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Style|Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/style/julia-cameron-the-artists-way.html
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Julia Cameron, making change at 70.
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Julia Cameron, making change at 70.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York
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Times
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Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages
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With “The Artist’s Way,” Julia Cameron invented the way people renovate the
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creative soul.
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Julia Cameron, making change at 70.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York
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Times
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Penelope Green
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By Penelope Green
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• Feb. 2, 2019
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SANTA FE, N.M. — On any given day, someone somewhere is likely leading an
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Artist’s Way group, gamely knocking back the exercises of “The Artist’s Way”
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book, the quasi-spiritual manual for “creative recovery,” as its author Julia
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Cameron puts it, that has been a lodestar to blocked writers and other artistic
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hopefuls for more than a quarter of a century. There have been Artist’s Way
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clusters in the Australian outback and the Panamanian jungle; in Brazil,
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Russia, the United Kingdom and Japan; and also, as a cursory scan of Artist’s
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Way Meetups reveals, in Des Moines and Toronto. It has been taught in prisons
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and sober communities, at spiritual retreats and New Age centers, from Esalen
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to Sedona, from the Omega Institute to the Open Center, where Ms. Cameron will
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appear in late March, as she does most years. Adherents of “The Artist’s Way”
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include the authors Patricia Cornwell and Sarah Ban Breathnach. Pete Townshend,
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Alicia Keys and Helmut Newton have all noted its influence on their work.
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So has Tim Ferriss, the hyperactive productivity guru behind “The Four Hour
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Workweek,” though to save time he didn’t actually read the book, “which was
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recommended to me by many megaselling authors,” he writes. He just did the
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“Morning Pages,” one of the book’s central exercises. It requires you write
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three pages, by hand, first thing in the morning, about whatever comes to mind.
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(Fortunes would seem to have been made on the journals printed to support this
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effort.) The book’s other main dictum is the “Artist’s Date” — two hours of
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alone time each week to be spent at a gallery, say, or any place where a new
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experience might be possible.
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Elizabeth Gilbert, who has “done” the book three times, said there would be no
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“Eat, Pray, Love,” without “The Artist’s Way.” Without it, there might be no
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adult coloring books, no journaling fever. “Creativity” would not have its own
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publishing niche or have become a ubiquitous buzzword — the “fat-free” of the
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self-help world — and business pundits would not deploy it as a specious
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organizing principle.
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Image
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The book’s enduring success — over 4 million copies have been sold since its
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publication in 1992 — have made its author, a shy Midwesterner who had a bit of
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early fame in the 1970s for practicing lively New Journalism at the Washington
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Post and Rolling Stone, among other publications, and for being married,
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briefly, to Martin Scorsese, with whom she has a daughter, Domenica — an
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unlikely celebrity. With its gentle affirmations, inspirational quotes,
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fill-in-the-blank lists and tasks — write yourself a thank-you letter, describe
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yourself at 80, for example — “The Artist’s Way” proposes an egalitarian view
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of creativity: Everyone’s got it.
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The book promises to free up that inner artist in 12 weeks. It’s a template
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that would seem to reflect the practices of 12-step programs, particularly its
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invocations to a higher power. But according to Ms. Cameron, who has been sober
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since she was 29, “12 weeks is how long it takes for people to cook.”
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Now 70, she lives in a spare adobe house in Santa Fe, overlooking an acre of
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scrub and the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. She moved a few years ago from
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Manhattan, following an exercise from her book to list 25 things you love. As
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she recalled, “I wrote juniper, sage brush, chili, mountains and sky and I
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said, ‘This is not the Chrysler Building.’” On a recent snowy afternoon, Ms.
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Cameron, who has enormous blue eyes and a nimbus of blonde hair, admitted to
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the jitters before this interview. “I asked three friends to pray for me,” she
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said. “I also wrote a note to myself to be funny.”
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In the early 1970s, Ms. Cameron, who is the second oldest of seven children and
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grew up just north of Chicago, was making $67 a week working in the mail room
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of the Washington Post. At the same time, she was writing deft lifestyle pieces
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for the paper — like an East Coast Eve Babitz. “With a byline, no one knows
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you’re just a gofer,” she said.
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In her reporting, Ms. Cameron observed an epidemic of green nail polish and
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other “Cabaret”-inspired behaviors in Beltway bars, and slyly reviewed a new
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party drug, methaqualone. She was also, by her own admission, a blackout drunk.
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“I thought drinking was something you did and your friends told you about it
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later,” she said. “In retrospect, in cozy retrospect, I was in trouble from my
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first drink.”
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She met Mr. Scorsese on assignment for Oui magazine and fell hard for him. She
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did a bit of script-doctoring on “Taxi Driver,” and followed the director to
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Los Angeles. “I got pregnant on our wedding night,” she said. “Like a good
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Catholic girl.” When Mr. Scorsese took up with Liza Minnelli while all three
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were working on “New York, New York,” the marriage was done. (She recently made
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a painting depicting herself as a white horse and Mr. Scorsese as a lily. “I
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wanted to make a picture about me and Marty,” she said. “He was magical-seeming
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to me and when I look at it I think, ‘Oh, she’s fascinated, but she doesn’t
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understand.’”)
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ImageUnder the pines.
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Under the pines.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
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In her memoir, “Floor Sample,” published in 2006, Ms. Cameron recounts the
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brutality of Hollywood, of her life there as a screenwriter and a drunk.
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Pauline Kael, she writes, described her as a “pornographic Victorian valentine,
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like a young Angela Lansbury.” Don’t marry her for tax reasons, Ms. Kael warns
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Mr. Scorsese. Andy Warhol, who escorts her to the premiere of “New York, New
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York,” inscribes her into his diary as a “lush.” A cocaine dealer soothes her —
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“You have a tiny little wife’s habit” — and a doctor shoos her away from his
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hospital when she asks for help, telling her she’s no alcoholic, just a
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“sensitive young woman.” She goes into labor in full makeup and a Chinese
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dressing gown, vowing to be “no trouble.”
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“I think it’s fair to say that drinking and drugs stopped looking like a path
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to success,” she said. “So I luckily stopped. I had a couple of sober friends
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and they said, ‘Try and let the higher power write through you.’ And I said,
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What if he doesn’t want to?’ They said, ‘Just try it.’”
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So she did. She wrote novels and screenplays. She wrote poems and musicals. She
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wasn’t always well-reviewed, but she took the knocks with typical grit, and she
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schooled others to do so as well. “I have unblocked poets, lawyers and
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painters,” she said. She taught her tools in living rooms and classrooms — “if
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someone was dumb enough to lend us one,” she said — and back in New York, at
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the Feminist Art Institute. Over the years, she refined her tools, typed them
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up, and sold Xeroxed copies in local bookstores for $20. It was her second
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husband, Mark Bryan, a writer, who needled her into making the pages into a
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proper book.
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The first printing was about 9,000 copies, said Joel Fotinos, formerly the
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publisher at Tarcher/Penguin, which published the book in 1992. There was
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concern that it wouldn’t sell. “Part of the reason,” Mr. Fotinos said, “was
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that this was a book that wasn’t like anything else. We didn’t know where to
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put it on the shelves — did it go in religion or self-help? Eventually there
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was a category called ‘creativity,’ and ‘The Artist’s Way’ launched it.” Now an
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editorial director at St. Martin’s Press, Mr. Fotinos said he is deluged with
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pitches from authors claiming they’ve written “the new Artist’s Way.”
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“But for Julia, creativity was a tool for survival,” he said. “It was literally
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her medicine and that’s why the book is so authentic, and resonates with so
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many people.”
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“I am my tool kits,” Ms. Cameron said.
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And, indeed, “The Artist’s Way” is stuffed with tools: worksheets to be filled
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with thoughts about money, childhood games, old hurts; wish lists and
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exercises, many of which seem exhaustive and exhausting — “Write down any
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resistance, angers and fears,” e.g. — and others that are more practical: “Take
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a 20 minutes walk,” “Mend any mending” and “repot any pinched and languishing
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plants.” It anticipates the work of the indefatigable Gretchen Rubin, the
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happiness maven, if Ms. Rubin were a bit kinder but less Type-A.
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“When I teach, it’s like watching the lights come on,” said Ms. Cameron. “My
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students don’t get lectured to. I think they feel safe. Rather than try and fix
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themselves, they learn to accept themselves. I think my work makes people
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autonomous. I feel like people fall in love with themselves.”
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Anne Lamott, the inspirational writer and novelist, said that when she was
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teaching writing full-time, her own students swore by “The Artist’s Way.” “That
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exercise — three pages of automatic writing — was a sacrament for people,” Ms.
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Lamott wrote in a recent email. “They could plug into something bigger than the
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rat exercise wheel of self-loathing and grandiosity that every writer
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experiences: ‘This could very easily end up being an Oprah Book,’ or ‘Who do I
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think I’m fooling? I’m a subhuman blowhard.’”
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“She’s given you an assignment that is doable, and I think it’s kind of a
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cognitive centering device. Like scribbly meditation,” Ms. Lamott wrote. “It’s
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sort of like how manicurists put smooth pebbles in the warm soaking water, so
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your fingers have something to do, and you don’t climb the walls.”
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Image
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In the wild.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
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Ms. Cameron continues to write her Morning Pages every day, even though she
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continues, as she said, to be grouchy upon awakening. She eats oatmeal at a
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local cafe and walks Lily, an eager white Westie. She reads no newspapers, or
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social media (perhaps the most grueling tenet of “The Artist’s Way” is a week
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of “reading deprivation”), though an assistant runs a Twitter and Instagram
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account on her behalf. She writes for hours, mostly musicals, collaborating
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with her daughter, a film director, and others.
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Ms. Cameron may be a veteran of the modern self-care movement but her life has
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not been all moonbeams and rainbows, and it shows. She was candid in
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conversation, if not quite at ease. “So I haven’t proven myself to be
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hilarious,” she said with a flash of dry humor, adding that even after so many
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years, she still gets stage-fright before beginning a workshop.
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She has written about her own internal critic, imagining a gay British interior
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designer she calls Nigel. “And nothing is ever good enough for Nigel,” she
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said. But she soldiers on.
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She will tell you that she has good boundaries. But like many successful women,
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she brushes off her achievements, attributing her unlooked-for wins to luck.
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“If you have to learn how to do a movie, you might learn from Martin Scorsese.
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If you have to learn about entrepreneurship, you might learn from Mark” — her
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second husband. “So I’m very lucky,” she said. “If I have a hard time blowing
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my own horn, I’ve been attracted to people who blew it for me.”
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