Open Book

Written By Ashley Park

Episode 2: Aubrey Gordon

 

June 18, 2025

Podcast star Aubrey Gordon (Maintenance Phase) discusses what a bookstore’s poetry section reveals about its true nature, the thrill of a literary "rug pull," and how sometimes the solution to "too much work reading" is… more reading? And Elena shares her go-to hack for getting your reading mojo back.

 
 
 

Show Notes

Aubrey Gordon is co-host of the podcast Maintenance Phase and author of What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat and You Just Need to Lose Weight: and 19 Other Myths About Fat People.

The title of Aubrey’s first book is an allusion to Raymond Carver’s short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Books recommended by Aubrey:

Books mentioned by Elena:

  • Best American Essays, which is an annual anthology. Elena recommends these books for general perusal when you don’t have the stamina to commit to a whole book.

 

  • Elena Passarello: Hi there, I'm writer Elena Passarello, and this is Open Book, a literary podcast from Live Wire Radio brought to you by Powell's Books, where we talk to writers about their reading habits. Now, when I'm not having fun being Live Wire's announcer, writing is totally my job. I am the author of two essay collections, and I'm currently mired in a third book project. Please wish me luck. And outside my own writing life, I teach the next generation of writers in an MFA program here in Oregon. And all of this is to say that books, without exaggeration, are my whole life. Sometimes I even dream about books, like this recurring nightmare I have of being chased by a first edition of Finnegans Wake. Anyway, this week we are talking to Aubrey Gordon. Aubrey is perhaps best known as the host of one of my favorite podcasts, Maintenance Phase. But she got started as a writer. She rose to fame as an anonymous blogger and has released two books, including one with a literary allusion in its title, 2021's What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat. I have learned so much from Aubrey's writing and reporting. I can honestly say that it's changed the way I move in this world. And I already knew she'd be a hoot from when we had her on Live Wire a few years back. And let me tell you, Aubrey did not disappoint. Stay tuned to hear her thoughts on reading essay collections, on the memoir that she would love to read that hasn't been written yet, and how you can suss out the true soul of a bookstore. This is Aubrey Gordon on Open Book. Aubrey, welcome to Open Book. 

    Aubrey Gordon: Thank you so much for having me. 

    Elena Passarello: We're glad you're here. How would you describe yourself as a reader? Like what adjectives kind of come to mind? 

    Aubrey Gordon: I would say I'm a person who reads for pleasure and also for work. My job is a lot, a lot a lot of reading. I would say that my patterns with reading are uneven that I will have multiple days where all I'm doing is reading. That's it, that's the whole day is just reading. And we'll do that for fun after quitting time as well. And then I will long stretches of like not really reading as much. I'm currently in a big wave cresting of a lot of reading. So I'm like, this is perfect timing. This is perfect time to just talk about this. 

    Elena Passarello: Oh, perfect. Great. And reading for pleasure, not just reading for maintenance. [Aubrey: Yes, absolutely.] Oh nice. 

    Aubrey Gordon:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

    Elena Passarello: Yeah, that's one thing that I always have a hard time with is becoming that reader again. If you read books for your job or you write books for your job, becoming the person who used to just sit with a flashlight under the covers and read for pleasure. Totally. What's the strategy for you to keep that alive? 

    Aubrey Gordon: Honestly, I feel like when I'm reading for work, it becomes easier to read for pleasure because I just want to read something totally different than whatever I've been reading for all day. And that feels really fun and rewarding to be like, all right, I've been reading about like garbage, terrible public health initiatives all day, and instead what I would like to do now. Is go read Oscar Wars, The History of the Oscars. 

    Elena Passarello: Well, that's such a great book. Michael Shulman. 

    Aubrey Gordon: It's so good. 

    Elena Passarello: Is that what you're reading right now? 

    Aubrey Gordon: It is one that I started reading while I was on vacation and then like set it aside. So it's been sitting on my bedside table, like staring at me while I've been reading other things. But like, my God, I've gone through the first sort of section of it and it's exceptional. It's exceptional 

    Elena Passarello: Yeah, it's a it's like a resource and an entertainment delight. It's this kind of history of the Oscars and story about. This is a man who knows how to write about acting. He's got a big, huge book on the method. Michael Schulman, I believe, is his name. [Aubrey: He's a New Yorker writer.] And it is it's like a tome, but it's sectioned out. So when your attention is ready to read something really dense and juicy and full of facts and things, you want to Google. But you don't have to move all the way through like a plotted novel where you'll lose the thread like. 

    Aubrey Gordon: Totally. And each of those sections is as you like, it's a meaty, you know, it'll be like 90 pages or something per section. And they're all, again, what I have read of it has been like absolutely extraordinary. I think the idea of the Academy of Motion Pictures being designed as sort of like a United Nations for the industry to like make everybody get along is really fascinating. And I also find it totally fascinating that the guy whose idea it was, was somebody that nobody wanted to hang with. So they were like, Good idea, but not with that guy. I don't want him convening it. You just wanted to make friends. Why are you? Totally the most antagonistic guy is like, I'm calling everyone together. 

    Elena Passarello: Do you, is that what your shelf, your bedside table is like? You've got like the big honker book that you can dip in and out of. And then you've got, what else is on there with the big like Michael Schulman historical tome? 

    Aubrey Gordon: That one is there, oh my God, what is the other giant one that's there is the authoritarian personality, incredible theorist. And then the ones that I keep in my living room are the ones I'm like a little more attentively like annotating, reading, that kind of stuff. And currently the ones in the living room are my most recently read books. And those were, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee. [Elena: Yes.] Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin and The White Album by Joan Didion. I've been on a real essay collection tear and it's unhinged to be that submerged in that quality of writing and thinking. 

    Elena Passarello: Uh-huh. 

    Aubrey Gordon: From all of these different, it's like really mind blowing work. It's really mind-blowing. 

    Elena Passarello: What does a, like, this is now a genre of book that maybe people don't immediately think of. They think of the novel, they think of a historical, they think the how-to. What can an essay collection or the collected works of a great essayist like James Baldwin, what does it do for you as a reader? 

    Aubrey Gordon: I think there's something about essays in particular that are looking to stitch together this sort of, you know, sort of work across fields and across lines of thought, right? That opening essay from the White Album, Joan Didion's opening essay, is a lengthy retelling of her time in like a mental institution and her sort of mental breakdown. And one of the closing lines of that essay is like, in retrospect, that was a rational response to 1968. And you're like, oh, wow, okay, right? Like that you thought you were reading this thing, right. And then you get this wild rug pull at the end. I mean, I think- That's great. Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom does the same sort of thing where you're like, I'm reading a book about bodies. And then, you're, whoops, capitalism, huh? How'd we get here? Given my druthers, essay collections are like one of my top choices. I just absolutely love them. And I think there is something, because I'm someone who writes from personal experience, there is about reading someone who's, you know, the old adage is like, write what scares you, write to the pain, write to where it hurts, whatever. And it is absolutely wild to watch the kinds of risks that these writers are taking with their own personal stories and their own experiences. 

    Elena Passarello: Yeah Baldwin, wow, like, it was just so much intelligence, so much vulnerability and so much critical thought. You feel smart, you feel called out, you feel grateful that somebody was that vulnerable with you across the decades now. 

    Aubrey Gordon: 100, all three of them, all 3 of those. It's really extraordinary. And I just, I think especially like the more of that kind of writing that I've done, the more in awe I am of folks' ability to do that and not only to like do it for the sake of doing it or unburdening themselves or something, but create something that is so insightful, that is is so incisive, that is meaningful on so many levels, right? That is operating on this like- emotional and political level in all of these cases, right, is really, really remarkable to me. Really impressive. Really impressive. 

    Elena Passarello: Me too. Whenever I really can't hold my attention to commit to a book that I really feel like I want to commit too, I just get a Best American Essays, you know, that anthology every year that comes out, and I just read around. It's like my Whitman sampler, because do you ever have that where it's like, I really want to read this big, important book, but I just don't have it in me right now? [Aubrey: 100%.] Even if it's a novel or whatever. 

    Aubrey Gordon: I was a few years ago, I was thinking about like a sci fi project. And then I was like, that's not this guy. Not for me. Thanks. But okay. I like reading it. And I like thinking about it. And my way to get into like reading more sci fi was I got the future tense anthology of speculative fiction. That was like a bunch of contemporary literary fiction writers taking on speculative fiction and doing really interesting things with it. And it, it feels like taking your. Oh, God, I'm about to say a thing that my mom says and I was about to say it uncritically, a thing that my adorable preschool teacher mom says is it's like taking your brain to the playground. 

    Elena Passarello: I thought you were going to say something dirty, but no... 

    Aubrey Gordon: No, God, no. Oh, God. We have different moms, I think. We do have different. We do have different moms. [Elena: Like taking your brain to the brothel.] But yeah, it feels like to get your brain to switch into such a completely different mode after that kind of like work reading that is very analytical, lots of like primary text medical studies and that kind of stuff, being able to like move into no, we're going to do some speculative fiction about a future dust bowl. Let's go. 

    Elena Passarello: Oh, that's great. Is that in the future tense anthology? It's good. So the other great benefit of this podcast I'm realizing is that my book list, my Powell's wish list is going to get thicker and bigger and better. And it's going to be great. So let me ask you about, do you have specific reading goals for like 2025? 

    Aubrey Gordon: I have sort of like areas of focus, maybe. I think the essay collection stuff is a place where I'm like finding a lot there that feels really fruitful and generative from like a writing perspective, but also from just a living in the world perspective. It feels like we're living in a time of like a lot of things getting flattened to a really dangerous degree and having folks like Didion and Baldwin and like these incredible, and Alexander Chee who are like. Just kidding, not only is it not flat, it's like 87 dimensional. This is what's happening, it's so complex. 

    Elena Passarello: You can pick one thing and talk about everything if you look at it like as deeply as you need to, as it deserves as something like life or family or history. Oh, speaking of, I wanted to ask you about memoir. [Aubrey: Yeah.] Sort of the other kind of non-fiction genre. Is there a memoir that hasn't been written, but like a person that you're like, if you don't write a memoir soon, I'm going to come to your house and set up a Dictaphone and make you say your memoir out loud in public. God. 

    Aubrey Gordon: God, that's a great question. Honestly, so before I was a writer as a community organizer, and I think I find myself really hungry again, especially now, for stories from people who know what the work is that it takes to like move the needle and to like shift folks' opinion, shift public opinion, all of that kind of stuff and the like extreme, I think we tend to think of those kinds of political acts as like a statement of purity or a statement of purity of intent or something. And I think that when you're a practitioner of that kind of stuff, you're like, oh, it's all messy all the time. All I'm doing is talking to people who I'm not 100% aligned with. And my job is to like hold the line and get people moving in the same direction. And like, just like, I feel like more of those kinds of like, you know, hard boiled labor organizers being like, here's what it took to unionize. Starbucks or whatever. Here's what it took to win this big fight. And getting into the mechanics of that kind of stuff, that feels really, really helpful to me. There's a memoir, oh my gosh, I think it's Jane McAlevey who wrote one who was an SEIU organizer for a long time. And it is a phenomenal book in terms of understanding, when people talk about quote unquote boots on the ground in politics, what that actually looks like. It's really extraordinary. 

    Elena Passarello: So that's a great take. It's not, I've lived this life, this happened to me, this is my childhood. You want a memoir about work and change. You want to memoir that gets, it shows the messy kind of slow glacial progress of change.

    Aubrey Gordon: Yeah, and I think the thing that nobody knows, like organizers know it, is that every single person has the capacity to surprise you deeply with their politics. I will absolutely never forget knocking on a door to talk about, I think it was trans healthcare. Oh. Wow. And the placard on the door, it was a house in Aloha and the placards on the doors had two crossed pistols and it said home security by Smith and Wesson. [Elena: Okay, okay.] And I was like... Well, I guess this is my job, is having a conversation with this guy. I absolutely would have advised all of our volunteers not to do that. But I was like, whatever, what's gonna... And I knocked on the door and this person answered the door in head to toe field camo. Oh my gosh. And I like gave the whole spiel about like, did you know that trans people are denied healthcare just because they're trans people, blah, blah. And he went, where do I sign? Like without missing a beat. And this was like 15 years ago, maybe. And I was like, funny story, I got real nervous about your placard here. And he got really impatient with me and went, I can't like guns and trans people. Oh, and I was, like, I guess you can. I stand corrected. I think stuff like that is also really heartening. [Elena: Yes.] To me, that's not just about, like it is about the glacial pace. Stuff and it's a marathon, not a sprint stuff and all of that, but it's also about stuff like that where you're like, what is this? How did we wind up here? Okay. 

    Elena Passarello: Let's not gloss over all this humanity. Let's see, the more that we see these specific people who have made their own decisions, the more we're gonna be able to understand each other as a community. [Aubrey: Absolutely.] That's great. Yeah. That's really, really great. 

    Aubrey Gordon: Yeah, and hold more complexity in ourselves and each other. 

    Elena Passarello: Cool. 

    Aubrey Gordon: Yeah! 

    Elena Passarello: So we always ask the same last question, but I've picked out this penultimate question just for you because I want to know what book would you consider to be like the little black dress of book gifts? Like you could give it to your ice cream vendor, you could it to your in-law. You could, like if you're trying to find a book just to give someone as a gift that you kind of know it's going to hit big across a lot of different types of people. 

    Aubrey Gordon: That is such a great question. I will say, I am predominantly a nonfiction reader. So I'm gonna say a couple of nonfiction titles that I think are really extraordinary. One is Pumped Up, which is the history of Uber. [Aubrey: Really?] Not kidding. The history of an Uber is a true horror show that really blew my brains right out of my head. Wow. Super incredible. Uh, so many monsters. So many monsters, so many monsters in that book. Oh my god. 

    Elena Passarello: Readably full of monsters. Oh, amazing. 

    Aubrey Gordon: Like, really, if you're a person who enjoys maybe, like, a cult documentary where you're like, oh, no, this isn't going good places, ba-ma, keep going, welcome, this book is for you. The other one I would say is Imbeciles by Adam Cohen. It's a history of Buck v. Bell, which is a Supreme Court case around eugenics in the United States, and it is a history the eugenic movement. 

    Elena Passarello: Which I hear about all the time on Maintenance Phase. It's amazing how many of these diet fads and medical schema are rooted in eugenics. 

    Aubrey Gordon: 100% there's the eugenics vibes are through the roof on a lot of diet stuff there's no question about that um this one was really fascinating to me because it had a lot to do with the architecture of the movement who was involved one of the big figures was Alexander Graham Bell in the eugenics movement. 

    Elena Passarello: Wow. 

    Aubrey Gordon: Because his wife was a deaf person and he saw how she was treated. And he was like, disabled people shouldn't have to go through this, ergo disabled people shouldn't be born. That was his conclusion of seeing his wife's, right? And I'm like, so that's a really different conversation than what we think about when we think about eugenics, which is like, you think about snidely whiplash tying someone to the train tracks, right. And not like someone. Trying to have a compassionate response and having a spectacular misfire. 

    Elena Passarello: Yeah, just a total boomerang in the wrong direction. 

    Aubrey Gordon: Wow. Absolutely incredible. Imbeciles. It's phenomenal. It's also where I learned that moron was previously a legal term tied to specific IQ scores that were legally defined for eugenics purpose. Like it is, it is a true like reconfigure your brain kind of book in an understanding of this issue. 

    Elena Passarello: Both of those unexpected and both of those immediately going on my Powell's wish list. Great, great, great. 

    Elena Passarello: Okay, last but not least, Aubrey, could you give us a controversial book opinion that you hold. 

    Aubrey Gordon: I mean, I think my most controversial thing, which is not really an opinion. It's just a habit is like mostly reading nonfiction. [Elena: It is a little controversial.] It's really. 

    Elena Passarello: People forget that it exists.

    Aubrey Gordon: They sure do! We're here, we're nonfiction, get used to it! Uh, yeah, I mean, I feel like, uh, that's the big one that people are like, what? Novels? Short stories? What? I will say one of the things that I, I do believe pretty deeply, um, is it's not even a belief. It's just sort of a practice. If I want to get to know a new bookstore, the place that I go is their poetry section. It absolutely feels like the world of poetry is so astoundingly wide and you can pick so many different little slivers of it and feel like that's a complete picture that it gives you a good sense of like, oh, this is a bookstore where they're like, our poetry section is Billy Collins and Mary Oliver, right? All right. We're playing the hits at this book. Got it. Cool. Or you go in and they're, like, we have this Kevin Samsel book that's like collage and poetry and you're like. All right, we're getting into some weird territory and I'm here for it. That is, I will say, I don't know how controversial of an opinion it is. It's rad. It's a rad opinion. It feels like an important one to me. 

    Elena Passarello: My husband always says if you want to know, if you go into a bar for the first time, you should order something like an old fashioned because it just shows you kind of how the bartender curates certain kind of crucial elements, you know, maybe that's what the poetry section is. [Aubrey: Maybe so.] It's like, are you curating at all? Are you just doing it kind of like super regular? Do you have a Kevin Samsel collage, Kevin Samsel, Greg Powell's employee and runs the small press section at the bookstore? So it is. I mean, that makes sense. Like your heart is in this kind of more niche part of the bookstore. Maybe you're in a in a beautiful place and it's a bunch of nature poems, poets or something. 

    Aubrey Gordon: 100%, I went to a bookstore in Ashland and they had, that I thought would just be sort of like, hey, you're at the Shakespeare Festival, here's a bunch of Shakespeare book stores. And they had most of their highlighted authors in the poetry section were local indigenous poets. And I was like, what is happening in Southern Oregon? Okay. Like that it gives you a window into the kind of relationships that they're building at the bookstore. It gives you window into like all of this different, you know, what their analysis is. Also like. How much do they empower staff to like take things in weird directions or not? Like, oh my God, I have goosebumps. 

    Elena Passarello: That's a pretty, it's a strong opinion, Aubrey, but it's really good. 

    Aubrey Gordon: I'm about to find how controversial it is. 

    Elena Passarello: Well, I think it's great. I mean, it's so controversial. I think I'm going to get it tattooed on some part of myself. I wish I could talk to you about books for another 16 hours. Thank you so much for this, and we're so glad that you could join us on Open Book. You can catch Aubrey on the Maintenance Phase podcast. And of course, you can get her books at powells.com. Make sure to check out their vast poetry section as well. Thanks again so much to Aubrey Gordon. Thanks for listening to Open Book. I'm Elena Passarello, your host. Our executive producer is Laura Hadden, and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Eben Hoffer is our technical director. Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid is our mixer. A Walker Spring composed our theme song, and Ashley Park is our social media marketer. A big thanks to the entire staff at Live Wire Radio, the fine folks at PRX, and of course, Powell's Books for sponsoring this podcast. Thanks for watching!

Ashley Park
Next

Episode 669