Transcript: A to BE Episode 7

Mimi Kwa (00:01):
People say life is a journey, not a destination. But how do you know you’re on the right path?
Jo Stanley (00:08):
If only we could see the signs when they appear.
Mimi Kwa (00:11):
Well, I’m Mimi Qua.
Jo Stanley (00:13):
And I’m Jo Stanley.
Mimi Kwa (00:14):
And on A to B, we speak to fascinating people about how they navigated their way to be here now, having profound impact on the world.
Jo Stanley (00:24):
We hope our conversations will help you reflect on everything you’ve been through to get here. The triumphs, challenges, and bumps along the road.
Mimi Kwa (00:34):
And if you haven’t already, find your own map to what matters.
Jayne Tuttle (00:39):
It’s very hard to put into a soundbite because there are so many elements that led to that moment on that stairwell, which is why I felt compelled to write not one, but two books about it.
Mimi Kwa (00:49):
Look at this suspense building up. I’m loving it. It’s great.
(00:54):
Now, our guest today has a travel story with you, Jo, which we are going to reveal later. She is an author of two beautiful books, and lives a fantasy that many of us have, I know I do. She has her very own bookstore.
Jo Stanley (01:10):
The dream, Mimi, and it’s down in Queenscliff, which is a beautiful part of Victoria. But yes, I first met the fabulous Jane Tuttle in Paris back when she was starting out as an actor. Did we mention she’s an actor as well? The city of Paris is significant because that is where the most life-changing moment of Jane’s life happened.
Mimi Kwa (01:33):
Now, Paris or Die is Jane’s first book. She’s now written another memoir called My Sweet Guillotine, or guillotine, if you’d like to pronounce it that way.
Jo Stanley (01:42):
Thanks.
Mimi Kwa (01:42):
Both fabulous books, but nothing quite so sublime, I’m sure you agree, Jo, as the woman herself. Her A to B is truly astounding.
Jo Stanley (01:52):
And the vulnerability and energy that she brings to our discussion is just brilliant.
(01:59):
Jayne, so lovely to see you on our podcast.
Jayne Tuttle (02:03):
Oh my God, it’s so nice to be here.
Jo Stanley (02:05):
Yes.
Jayne Tuttle (02:06):
Hi, Jo. Hi, Mimi.
Mimi Kwa (02:06):
I’m excited.
Jo Stanley (02:08):
Oh my God. You know how women’s voices get so high when we get excited? I’m aware that I need to-
Jayne Tuttle (02:14):
I’m aware of that. I’ve got a very high voice when I’m excited.
Jo Stanley (02:16):
Do you?
Jayne Tuttle (02:17):
Oh my gosh. I was at Sorrento Writers Festival, which was amazing, and they came up and said, “Can you just introduce what the event is that you’re doing?” And my voice was so high, it’s actually just terribly embarrassing. So when you introduced me then-
Mimi Kwa (02:31):
What was it like, “It was Hi, I’m Jayne Tuttle”.
Jayne Tuttle (02:31):
It’s mortifying.
Jo Stanley (02:31):
So, all right then-
Jayne Tuttle (02:31):
Yes, keeping it nice and low-
Jo Stanley (02:39):
That leads me to ask the questions.
(02:41):
Today, Jane, you are here to talk about your A to B, right?
Jayne Tuttle (02:45):
Yes.
Jo Stanley (02:46):
Which is the journey that led you to this moment right now. And there’s a bit of awkwardness in this, in that a big part of your journey is an event that happened in Paris, which you’ve written two memoirs sort of about, but about much more than that. And I don’t know whether you’re able to tell the story and the spoiler alert around that for people who might want to read your memoirs.
Mimi Kwa (03:07):
Because I’ve just read Paris Will Die and it is sensational. It is just such an amazing book, and I hope that my voice isn’t getting really high now, because I’m getting excited about it. It’s a really amazing book.
(03:23):
So yes, is it a spoiler if we discuss the…?
Jayne Tuttle (03:27):
Incident.
Mimi Kwa (03:27):
Incident.
Jayne Tuttle (03:28):
Look, I don’t think it’s a spoiler at all because I feel like it’s so strange that I repeat it over, and over, and over again, and I still can’t quite grasp that it happened.
Jo Stanley (03:40):
It’s literally one of the most… Because do you know why again, Mimi, our paths have crossed before.
Mimi Kwa (03:47):
Yes.
Jo Stanley (03:47):
So I met Jane in Paris and years later my husband Daz says to me, “Oh my God, Jane had this accident”. And it has sat with me since the very moment I heard the story. It is so amazing. So you best share it.
Jayne Tuttle (04:04):
When you heard the story from Darren, I’m curious to know what you understood because most people said to me, and I talk about this in the second book a lot, “So sorry, you got your head caught in an elevator? You fell down the lift shaft? I don’t understand”. And I think-
Jo Stanley (04:21):
Yeah, it was very simply, I believe I thought it was the door, that elevator door. But then he explained the setup, it’s in Paris. It’s one of those old apartment buildings. You should tell the story.
Mimi Kwa (04:38):
You should tell the story, because I think there’s this Australian nuance around what we understand to be an elevator or a lift and there’s the Parisian version.
Jayne Tuttle (04:46):
Yes. And actually before I tell the story, I will say that the reason that it’s very hard to put into a soundbite because there are so many elements that led to that moment on that stairwell, which is why I felt compelled to write not one but two books about it.
Mimi Kwa (05:01):
Look at this suspense building up. I’m loving it, it’s great.
Jayne Tuttle (05:06):
So it was January, Paris was dark. That’s the opening of Paris or Die. And that’s the setting of how this happened. So it was a very dark night in the middle of winter in Paris. I was very lonely. I’d just broken up with my boyfriend of two years, my fiance actually, I just finished theater school, I had spent the Christmas period alone in this little apartment without enough money to buy a coffee, or go to the movies, or anything. So I sat in the dark a lot, drinking a cup of soup. And this one night, early in the New Year, I got a phone call from a friend who lived down the road asking if I’d come to dinner. And I was disproportionately excited about going to this dinner and seeing these friends.
Jo Stanley (05:47):
Very, very high voice.
Jayne Tuttle (05:48):
Very high voice, I was very excited. I’ll be there.
(05:49):
And so I rode my bike over and arrived in this building that I knew reasonably well. It was one of those very old Paris buildings. Actually, if you’ve ever seen Three Colors Blue with Juliette Binoche, you can actually see about halfway through the movie, she walks up a stairwell and you see a lift just moving freely up and down the center. It gives me a bit of a heart attack when I see that scene. So you picture the old Paris stairwell, there’s this intricate beautiful old lift that just runs up the center with no protection around it. So you open the little gate downstairs and you step in it and you go upstairs. This night it was very dark and this lift was deadly silent and I’d never taken it before because my friends lived on the second floor of the building.
(06:44):
I walked up the stairs to the second floor and knocked on the door and my friends weren’t there, which was strange. So I rang my friend and said, “Where are you?” And she said, “I’m just entering the building”. And so I looked down and I saw my friend Sophie and her little daughter, Lou coming up the stairwell. And I started to play this little game with the little girl, “Lou”, and she looked up and said, “Jay”. And I said, “Lou”. And I lent over the balcony just slightly and suddenly there was this moment where I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t know what had happened. But from the outside what had actually happened was, I had put my head in the path of the descending elevator. So I was standing on the stairwell still just leaning over.
(07:30):
And these lifts were inserted in the middle of the stairwells in the mid-century, so the banisters are very low and I’m super tall, and I was wearing heels that night. So I sort of easily like at home in Australia, you lean over them. I used to call downstairs, “Mom, what’s for dinner?” It was a bit like playing that game. So I by some freak of nature, I managed to pull my head out. I think I was pretty aware that my life was about to end. I pulled my head out and fell down the stairs and in doing so, broke my neck. Really, it’s impossible to understand how I survived.
Mimi Kwa (08:07):
Sorry, so before you go on, how quickly did it happen that you were able to, because I’ve just read your book and I’ve just sort of been trying to put myself in your shoes and understand how it happened. And obviously as there was impact, you had no idea what was going on. But on the outside, was your reflex that fast that you kind of pulled your head out of the way enough not to get taken down with the lift?
Jayne Tuttle (08:38):
Yeah, I think it felt like when you have an accident and it feels like it takes minutes or hours.
Mimi Kwa (08:46):
It slows down.
Jayne Tuttle (08:46):
At the moment I remember really clearly watching Lou and Sophie walking up the stairs and just thinking, “Oh, this is funny. I can’t make a sound. Oh, I sort of want to call out. I feel strange”. But in fact, as time’s gone on, I’ve realized I must have pulled it out straight away because they don’t know why the lift stopped. They never figured it out. It actually stopped on the second floor, but there was no reason for it to stop because no one had called it to this day have this feeling that it was my will to live. I remember this really strong roar just rising in my body. It was like I described it in the book as like a train arriving. And at that moment I blacked out. So I don’t even actually remember pulling my head out. I don’t remember even really knowing that-
Mimi Kwa (09:37):
I’ve got this incredible vision of you just standing in front of a train with your hand out and just stopping the train. It was like that.
Jo Stanley (09:45):
It’s like your primal being.
Jayne Tuttle (09:46):
Well, that’s what I thought. And I do discuss this in the second book, but the inspectors later on, I actually went back and pursued more detail on how the accident happened, and the lift experts all just laughed their heads off when they said, but you had to have pressed the call button for the lift. And I said, “No, why would I? My friends were walking up the stairs, I didn’t even know where it was”. And he said, “Well, how did the lift stop?” And I said, “Look, I had this crazy rising of energy”. And he just laughed. He was like, “It’s 1.5 tons of…”
Jo Stanley (10:18):
Steel.
Jayne Tuttle (10:19):
Steel and wood. But there’s also, this is woo-woo, but as we were just talking about-
Mimi Kwa (10:26):
Love it.
Jayne Tuttle (10:27):
My mom… There’s a lot of discussion of grief in these books and I have this secret little feeling that she pushed the button. It was not your time to go. But it was a huge wake-up call to say the least. It was a very strange and dark and interesting moment.
Jo Stanley (10:52):
So you ended up obviously being taken to emergency and the unfolding recovery from that, I imagine still goes on.
Jayne Tuttle (11:03):
Yeah, totally. To be clear, I recovered amazingly well. The accident happened just after I’d finished these two years at this theater school in Paris called Lecoq, this extremely rigorous theater school. So I always liken it to Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2.
(11:18):
Actually. My body was so strong and I fell well if that’s possible with a broken neck. Somehow I fell down a flight of stairs probably with the broken neck and somehow didn’t displace it. So massively lucky to be able to, first of all, to be alive, but second of all to be able to move. They didn’t actually have to operate because at the time I was just turned 30 and they said, “If you’re a few years older, you would’ve had to have a lot more intervention. But if we put you in this full on cage, I called it like a brace. And you don’t move for four months, you will heal”.
Mimi Kwa (11:54):
So there’s a moment in the book as well where you loosened the brace and your sister told you a story that made you quickly put it back on. What was that?
Jayne Tuttle (12:04):
Yeah, The Man on the Road.
(12:05):
The Man on the Road is in a big car accident, fatal collision, and he’s on the highway and he walks down to the next house, he gets up and he’s okay miraculously gets up and walks to a house and knocks on the door and he says there’s been an accident. And they say, “Where?” And he turns to show them and he falls down dead. So that’s the accident that I had. Exactly that my neck was fractured, but it was not displaced. So if I turned in any way, I would have… yeah, I wouldn’t be here. So my sister one night, who’s a nurse, she was looking after me and I loosened the brace because it was hell to be in this cage. And she screamed at me, “You’ve no idea how close you are to death at every second for these next few months”.
Jo Stanley (12:55):
So that was those months. But then there were, I mean like I say, how long ago was that?
Jayne Tuttle (13:00):
So that was 2007 the accident happened. So what’s that 14…
Jo Stanley (13:03):
Fifteen.
Jayne Tuttle (13:04):
15 years yeah.
Jo Stanley (13:06):
No.
Mimi Kwa (13:06):
Hang on.
Jo Stanley (13:06):
Yes, 15. All of us trying to do maths.
Jayne Tuttle (13:08):
Yes.
Mimi Kwa (13:08):
All of the creatives trying to do maths. Let’s get out of our calculator.
Jo Stanley (13:13):
That’s the problem.
Mimi Kwa (13:19):
We’ll just go to a break.
Jo Stanley (13:21):
Does anybody get a calculator? So let’s say 15 years in that time, how has that informed the person you are?
Jayne Tuttle (13:29):
Oh, massively. I mean, it’s hard for me to know from the outside. I sort of look at the years. The first few years afterwards were very tenuous. I just finished theater school, so the natural progression was to go on and make theater and I had a theater company with some friends from school and that was the sort of trajectory. But I found that I couldn’t perform because I was so afraid of being bumped. I had this and quite a lot of PTSD around freak accidents, like freak things happening. I suppose because the lift was so bizarre and so out of the blue. I constantly thought things were going to just drop out of the sky, such as… In the second book I talk a lot about the pot plants in Paris that are up on the window sills. I just can’t believe, I’m constantly waiting for a pot plant to just drop.
Jo Stanley (14:20):
I often thought about how are they secure?
Mimi Kwa (14:25):
It’s a reasonable concern.
Jo Stanley (14:25):
They’re not right.
Mimi Kwa (14:25):
But you were being hypervigilant.
Jayne Tuttle (14:27):
Yes.
Mimi Kwa (14:28):
Afterwards.
Jayne Tuttle (14:28):
And even going on from that, being a mother, I remember moving back to Australia and being really freaked out by driving, and thinking that a car could just come. Not at all, not so worried about my own driving, definitely worried about that, but more worried about just a car coming from nowhere as still a bit… And I thought that was normal.
Jo Stanley (14:51):
It’s normal for someone who’s had an elevator fall on their head, that is normal, because a freak thing did happen to you. It has trained you to believe that it can happen again.
Mimi Kwa (15:02):
So what was it then about your… I’m interested in your relationship with your sister and with your family growing up. What was it, do you think, about your connection to family or who you were that gave you the resilience? Obviously the fierceness that came from you was from your mother, losing your mom. But when you were a child, what was your childhood like? What were you like?
Jayne Tuttle (15:27):
Yeah, I was the village idiot in the family. So that was, I remember my mom saying, “Oh, Jane must you always be the village idiot?”
(15:36):
I was this sort of annoying big sister clown trying to get attention all the time fighting. I suppose I was the first child, so when the siblings came along, I was always felt like my spotlight was under threat. But in terms of resilience, definitely, I mean on a practical level, I was nourished by my family after the accident. My sister came over to Paris and took me out of the hospital which they were very glad for. They didn’t have space for me. So I was released really early in her care. She’s looked after me for, I think it was a month or six weeks even until I was ready to fly home.
(16:14):
Then I spent four months living with my dad down in this little seaside village of Point Lonsdale, which was really a very beautiful time. People felt very worried and sorry for me, but I had an exquisite time with my dad in this simple little life being fed and washed by him, which was a bit odd. But going on a very strong family, my two younger brothers as well. So I always had that.
(16:41):
My dad used to always say when I lived overseas for example, or when I went and did something a bit crazy, he’d always say, “You always have somewhere to come back to”. After my mom died, I felt a real desire to flee and to never come back. Which Paris or Die, I talk about a lot this desire to leave everything that was familiar behind and leave that nest, I suppose, I couldn’t quite confront the fact that everything looked the same after she was gone like work and my family, my friends, even though of course they were going through their own grief and their own story. So I think they’ve endured a lot, my family. I’ve definitely put them through the ringer, but they’ve always been extremely supportive. And it’s not easy to read my books I think, as one of my family members.
Jo Stanley (17:30):
No, I don’t. I mean there’s a lot of sex apart from anything else.
Jayne Tuttle (17:33):
Well yeah, my dad does that John Ritter face when he’s like, “I skipped past those parts”. He’s cool about it though. He’s much cooler than I expected. He’s really-
Jo Stanley (17:44):
Well, you’re an adult.
Jayne Tuttle (17:47):
Well, yeah. One of the hardest things was right, putting words to this person who we all miss and we all have our own idea of, putting my words to that was extremely, that was really tough. Just wanting to get it right and failing completely of course.
Jo Stanley (18:04):
Well, I will say that that’s almost my favorite. The books, Paris or Die is about multiple plot lines there. The love affair with Adrian, and the loss of your mother. You write about grief so beautifully, and I think that that’s hard to do. I was reading about how we are that there’s a pathologizing of grief that actually the symptoms of grief often is now treated as a mental illness and people don’t allow you to let the grief just sit, and it can take decades, however long it takes, right?
Jayne Tuttle (18:36):
Yeah.
Jo Stanley (18:37):
And you really kind of talk about grief in a beautifully real and raw way I loved.
Jayne Tuttle (18:42):
These books are set in Paris, but what was interesting to me the most was to see Paris through different eyes. So you really see them, you see Paris through the eyes of a young grieving theater person in the first book, and in the second through a person who’s suffered trauma, a physical trauma. So there’s another level of… there’s a different relationship with Paris.
(19:07):
But the grief, I think that having lost someone in a really, well, having lost somebody, I lost my mom to cancer, which was really extremely difficult obviously. And I think that once you’ve had that, you are, to have your head nearly cut off by a descending elevator is actually kind of nothing. I remember one of the first thoughts I had was like, I don’t have cancer. I’m fine. I’m going to get better. She wasn’t going to get better. So how could you ever feel sorry for yourself? Your only choice really is to just go out and live as hard as you can and as fully as you can and just milk it. That’s when I feel her. I feel closest to her.
Jo Stanley (19:47):
Yeah, we’ll talk about A to B. We are so much created by the losses we’ve had.
Mimi Kwa (19:52):
And do you think that loss then can be regarded as a trauma that needs to be processed and not compartmentalize, that as you say, Jo, can take years to actually get over, but you never get over it. I mean when people say, “oh, time heals”.
Jo Stanley (20:09):
“Time heals”.
Mimi Kwa (20:09):
I mean that’s just rubbish, isn’t it?
Jayne Tuttle (20:12):
Yeah. I find it absurd to be honest, even the idea of getting over it. I feel like maybe if we accept that we’re never going to get over it, it’s going to live with us forever and it’s going to morph, and it’s going to change and there’ll be days where it won’t be as acute.
Jo Stanley (20:27):
Reading the way you wrote about her passing, there are people who have lost loved ones to cancer who feel seen because of the way you wrote it.
Jayne Tuttle (20:38):
Yeah, thanks. I think that’s true.
Jo Stanley (20:40):
So now you are a mother, and I’m so interested to know how that is informed by not just your experience being mothered, but also not having your mother with you.
Jayne Tuttle (20:53):
Yes, it’s huge. I’m writing a lot about it now. My third book is about being a mother in Paris, and trying to manage the reality of life with the dream life that you have. And the ability that you’ve had to always control to go out and seek to achieve the things you want. And then becoming a mother and realize-
Jo Stanley (21:19):
Ruins everything.
Mimi Kwa (21:20):
Yeah, how impossible that actually is to do-
Jayne Tuttle (21:39):
And how little control.
Mimi Kwa (21:39):
With any aplomb.
Jo Stanley (21:39):
Yes, aplomb. Oh my God, good word.
Mimi Kwa (21:39):
Thank you very much.
(21:40):
And you know, where my arrows are pointing to in the book. How instrumental was your great love at the time, relationship, in your trajectory? Do you think, as to who you are as a human. Because obviously the accident just flipped everything in your life, and so it’s probably difficult to dissect who you would’ve been had that accident not happened, and the impact that your relationship would’ve had on you. But can you kind of go back to that time and think about how you met and what you were sort of trying to gain from that relationship, or what you were hoping that you were both going to evolve into?
Jayne Tuttle (22:24):
Yes. Well, I remember when I left Australia to go to the Lecoq School, I had one mission in my mind, and that was just disappear into the dark night. I wanted to lose myself completely in this other culture. I didn’t want to look back, just had a boyfriend when I left Australia. So sadly I couldn’t. He was like he was part of that grief and he just got cut off, left behind. I couldn’t bring that over into this life. I knew I wanted to disappear. And so then along comes this very dark, very French man, and I remember being quite lost in this idea of catapulting myself onto him.
Mimi Kwa (23:06):
Can we just say devastatingly good-looking as described in your book as well?
Jayne Tuttle (23:11):
Yes, he was extraordinarily good-looking. It was like a dream in a lot of ways. I had sort of programmed, my boyfriend back home had said to me, “You are just going to run off with some Frenchman”. And I remember thinking, “I don’t want to do, that’s not what this plan is”. But I remember thinking there was a note in that, and it sounds romantic kind. It’s sort of embarrassing in a way that he was so that cardboard cut out. But it was like I was living in a dream at that point. My life… I’d sort of died in a way. I was sort of off in the clouds. And so of course this perfume model man is standing in front of me. And of course he doesn’t speak English. And of course he’s an actor. I feel compelled to ride this thing, ride being probably not the right choice of words, but-
Jo Stanley (24:12):
At times very much the right choice of words.
Jayne Tuttle (24:12):
But he represented so much that was just in another world to me. And he was a different… he was culturally very different to anything, he was dangerous, he was jealous, he was insecure, he was from a very old boys school. So he had this kind of aristocratic group of friends, which was also part of this weird fantasy, I suppose, in some ways.
Mimi Kwa (24:39):
So do you feel like you created this construct around you? Is that kind of what you’re saying?
Jayne Tuttle (24:44):
Yeah.
Mimi Kwa (24:45):
It’s almost that the words of your ex-boyfriend helped you to manifest this new life because you’d set yourself adrift from-
Jo Stanley (24:53):
I mean, if you were a script writer, it’s literally a movie what you created.
Jayne Tuttle (24:57):
Yeah. It’s like I say, it would be almost cliche to have that guy. You’d be like, “Oh seriously, A French guy isn’t that”. But he also can be, and it is that heightened reality. But it was, I believe you met him, Jo- spent New Years with him.
Jo Stanley (25:12):
I did, yes. And he was devastatingly good looking.
Jayne Tuttle (25:15):
He was insane.
(25:16):
It was on another-
Jo Stanley (25:17):
And his friends too. They were all like… I remember just going, “I’m so Australian and so bogan”.
Mimi Kwa (25:27):
They’re all so sophisticated.
Jayne Tuttle (25:28):
We knew how to have fun and they really… It was an interesting milieu to break into. It was quiet. There was a lot of rules. And at the same time, I’m at this theater school where it’s about just letting it all out, letting it all go. There was no, if any false pretension was just drilled out of you. So as time went on with the theater school and I became more and more sort of pummeled deeper into the creative part of myself and the real part of myself, the more it became at odds with this sort of ordered Frenchman’s life and the more we began to clash. And the frencher I actually became, conversely, the more I understood his language, the more I learned my own through my friends in the theater school, through my environment in the 10th arrondissement, the more that we just didn’t see each other anymore. It almost was like he disappeared into sort of with the smoking band, he just kind of disappeared.
Mimi Kwa (26:30):
It’s almost like you created him, you projected your aspirations of this new life that you were constructing around yourself. And then he disappeared just in the movie that I feel that you now have to make.
Jayne Tuttle (26:44):
Yes, let’s make it come back.
Jo Stanley (26:45):
And so the other interesting thing, so if we’re talking about this pathway that makes us who we are in this moment right now, and it’s made up of massive events like an accident like yours, but made up of tiny things as well, right? They’re the jigsaw puzzle pieces, the places we were. And Paris, we all have those environments that we maybe have lived in or perhaps we’re in for a fleeting moment that have created us. So what impact has Paris had on you?
Jayne Tuttle (27:14):
Such a huge impact. I mean, I probably went to Paris, I got that crazy grant. But the idea of Paris was in my head because I’d been there as an Au pair when I was 22. I’d studied it through uni in school, and I hated Paris when I went as an Au pair. Absolutely hated it. I was miserable. I stayed in my little room and read Brett Easton Ellis novels, and then I went home.
(27:37):
But it left something with me in that moment. I had this moment where I saw the view for myself in Paris for the first time. I didn’t even know what the point was of ever being alone. And that first trip just sowed that seed in me. Oh, there’s actually life to be had just on my own. And so after mum died, I instantly thought began to think of Paris again because I’d known for a fleeting second what it was to be alone. And then when I arrived in the 10th arrondissement, which was on the Rue Du Faubourg Saint-Denis where so much of my writing takes place. In fact, all three books take place around this street. Turning up in that street was like entering a new world. It’s just an absolute heady clash of culture, and language, and smells, and colors. And it was in anonymity. I could pretend I was from somewhere else. I wasn’t going to bump into anyone I knew in my street or in my neighborhood-
Jo Stanley (28:37):
So could that have been anywhere? Did it have to be in that street?
Jayne Tuttle (28:40):
I actually think I could have gone to Turkey. I could have gone to Japan. It could have been anywhere at that point. The grief had made me a real sponge.
Mimi Kwa (28:48):
So what was the sliding door moment, or the epiphany, or the trigger that sent you the second time? Other than the fact you’d already planted the seed of wanting to be in Paris, but what made you go for the grant to be able to afford to go back and study?
Jayne Tuttle (29:04):
That was another little woo-woo magic moment because I had done a workshop when I was at theater school in Australia. I’d done a workshop with, actually, I remember Jo, you did one with a clown from Brazil. He had-
Jo Stanley (29:18):
At the workshop festival.
Jayne Tuttle (29:19):
Yeah. It was like an international workshop festival and all these fantastic people came from all over the world. And in that workshop there were a few people that had been to the Lecoq School in Paris. I’d heard of it, but I didn’t really know anything about it and they talked a lot about it. And that sowed the seed, started thinking about Paris again. And I thought, “oh my God, I would love to go to that theater school”. I started reading books about it and then I investigated it, and it was horrendously expensive. Impossible. I didn’t have a pot to piss in. I was eating tuna out of a can I think for dinner.
Jo Stanley (29:50):
I mean, you could have afforded a plate, surely.
Jayne Tuttle (29:51):
I couldn’t. No. Straight out of the can.
Jo Stanley (29:59):
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Jayne Tuttle (30:00):
I know that’s true. Yes, I probably could have. It was a state of mind thing.
Jo Stanley (30:07):
Sorry.
Jayne Tuttle (30:09):
Yeah. And so I put it out, I’d worked with this theater company, the Melbourne-French Theater Company, and I just put an email out to the director and said, “I’m thinking of applying for a scholarship. Do you know of any scholarships or can I apply to the embassy?”
(30:22):
And then by some miracle, what had actually happened was it was that moment in life where they happened to have had someone cancel something. They had the money sitting there, they needed to attribute it quick because the end of the financial year coming around or something. My friend sends this email, bam, I got two years at this incredible theater school. My fees were paid, my cut decision was paid. It was like a miracle. Two years of pure creativity-
Jo Stanley (30:50):
Because the universe wanted you to do that.
Mimi Kwa (30:54):
Do you think that things are meant to be?
Jayne Tuttle (30:57):
Yeah. Well I think, when you look back, they’re always meant to be. Who knows what I would’ve done…
Jo Stanley (31:03):
But so then because my mind unravels.
Jayne Tuttle (31:05):
It’s kind of freaky.
Jo Stanley (31:06):
The universe wanted you to be at that school, wanted you to meet Adrian, wanted you to then even what has happened since having the accident, all of these moments along your path are connected, right?
Jayne Tuttle (31:19):
Yeah.
Jo Stanley (31:21):
One can’t exist without the other, do you think?
Jayne Tuttle (31:23):
Actually I do think about this. “If this”. I remember when that grant came about. I remember saying to my sister, “Oh my God, this is a miracle. How did it happen?” And she said, “Yeah, but you did study French for years and years. You’re an actor acting did. Yeah, we did bonus together apply”. Yeah. So it’s not like it’s come out of nowhere, but I do think, yeah, we are all on apart and I think there’s opportunities.
Mimi Kwa (31:51):
It’s the interconnectedness of everything.
Jo Stanley (31:54):
Your sister is a pragmatist and I love her for it, but I’m quite the opposite. But we need both in this world, don’t you?
Mimi Kwa (32:02):
It’s totally the universe.
Jo Stanley (32:02):
One last thing before we get to our fun little surprise and delight, which is Mimi’s turn today. It is that connection and that just chance connection. And I love the story of how you and your husband connected over cryptic crossword. I mean, I think that that’s…
Mimi Kwa (32:16):
Very hot.
Jo Stanley (32:23):
I feel like the stories of how people meet is the epitome of A to B and sliding doors because a shift a millimeter either way, and you might not have met.
Jayne Tuttle (32:34):
So true. Well, when you get older and if you meet someone even for a second, you’re like, “Okay, marriage, kids…” You start running ahead. Oh, “what’s this going to mean?” and everything.
(32:45):
We had the beauty of having that relieved from us because I was robot girl in this neck head brace. I was a mess of a human stitches. So we had this opportunity to be friends, and to get to know each other, and to talk. And the David Astle Cryptic crossword on a Friday in the age is like a secret society of freaky nerds. And I would do four or five clues in a week and I’d be done. It was so hard. And Matt in his own corner was doing the cryptic as well, doing his own five or six clues. Then we get together and start putting our brain, he would get the opposite end of the grid to me. And so together, we actually formed this perfect brain.
Jo Stanley (33:35):
I love it.
Jayne Tuttle (33:35):
And we got one out together. That sounds so…
Mimi Kwa (33:39):
Word nerds unite.
Jayne Tuttle (33:42):
But yeah, it was put on the fridge and it was pretty cool.
Jo Stanley (33:46):
That’s awesome. And I think now how many people are being brought together by Wordle, which even the origin story of Wordle is fun.
Mimi Kwa (33:53):
The next journey we are going to go on,
Jo Stanley (33:54):
Oh yes…
Mimi Kwa (33:56):
Is our surprise and delight segment, which is an origin story about something well-known. I did try to choose an origin story, not necessarily related to you, Jayne, but with you in mind.
Jayne Tuttle (34:08):
I’m very excited.
Mimi Kwa (34:09):
With all of us in mind, actually. We are going back to 1924 in Dallas, Bette Clair McMurray is born. Her mother owned a knitting store and taught Bette how to paint. This is a very important element to the story.
Jo Stanley (34:23):
I love it already.
Mimi Kwa (34:24):
Highlight that. And her father worked in an auto parts store, not as important, but still important. Bette grew up with a creative parent and a parent who likes to fix things. She got married at 17 to her childhood sweetheart, a soldier called Warren who went off to World War II and while he was away, she had their only son, Michael, who crazily and unrelated to this story was a band member in the Monkeys.
Jo Stanley (34:54):
Love it.
Mimi Kwa (34:55):
I don’t want to get distracted by that.
Jo Stanley (34:56):
I do like the aside.
Mimi Kwa (34:59):
It is an amazing and interesting aside.
(35:00):
All right, I won’t get distracted. Warren and Bette, the husband and wife, they got divorced in 1946 and with a small child to support, Bette had to take on several odd jobs, understandably. And she eventually learned shorthand and typing. Finally, she found a full-time job as an executive secretary at the Texas Bank and Trust in Dallas. Typewriters had just gone from fabric to carbon ribbons. And this is probably going to make zero sense to anybody who was born in the last 25 years. But I feel like us at this table understand.
Jo Stanley (35:35):
I know, explaining what an electric typewriter is to my daughter. Her brain just, she’s like, “What? You couldn’t delete?” I’m like, “No.
Mimi Kwa (35:40):
Exactly. Well, this is bringing us to the denouement of the story. And the keypad was more sensitive, so that meant more errors by the typists in the typing pool, erasers that had once worked now smeared the carbon across the paper and it was a secretarial disaster.
(36:01):
But don’t worry because Bette who knew how to paint, who knew how to mix paints and remembered that painters paint over their mistakes on canvas. Bette thought, “Why can’t we just paint over our mistakes?” And so, oh my goodness Bette invented liquid paper.
Jo Stanley (36:19):
Amazing.
Mimi Kwa (36:19):
But the story doesn’t end there.
Jo Stanley (36:26):
Oh my god. Good on your Bette with your liquid paper, I could not have got through year 12 without you.
Mimi Kwa (36:28):
She called it Mistake Out.
Jo Stanley (36:30):
Call it what it is, explain to people on the packet.
Mimi Kwa (36:33):
Exactly. Anyway, so her son, who eventually went on to join the Monkeys, he and his friend, this is pre-band, he and his friend sat in her kitchen, and in her garage eventually as the business grew filling up these little bottles of Mistake Out. She got married again. She and her husband then grew the company to the point where they were selling hundreds of thousands of Mistake Outs. She then divorced her husband for whatever reason, I don’t know. She was now a single woman again with a full-time, small business that she worked in. She applied for a patent. Liquid Paper was very successful, but the husband was still on the board of the business. And then he squeezed her out.
(37:21):
But luckily she had the strength and tenacity within her to fight back. And she somehow legally won back the business, won back the patent. And then sold Liquid Paper, as it had been renamed, to Gillette for 47 and a half million dollars, and her royalty rights were reserved.
Jo Stanley (37:43):
Bette. Good on you Bette.
Mimi Kwa (37:45):
It was a bit of everything in that, wasn’t there?
(37:47):
Bit Of writing, type writing, painting, girl power.
Jayne Tuttle (37:51):
Writing.
Jo Stanley (37:51):
Were you a writer as a child? Were you a performer as a child? What, like Bette might you have actually discovered as a child that you now are informed by?
Jayne Tuttle (38:02):
So I think I was quite fascinated with the world of performance from a young age. I definitely was putting on plays and things like that from the womb. And so theater was always something that I love. And so I’m constantly trying to reach out to the audience. I was always very embarrassed about the accident and about my story, but I needed to reach another level of it in order to distance it from myself.
Mimi Kwa (38:31):
Why were you embarrassed?
Jayne Tuttle (38:32):
About the accident or about… Oh my God, I was mortified. In fact, I didn’t want to put it in the first, in Paris or Die for a very long time. It took me a long time to accept that that was very much part of that story. I think I was embarrassed. A lot of it was because I didn’t understand it either, and it was hard to write about and hard to articulate because I was never sure how responsible I was. I was so worried that I had hurt other people, upset other people. It’s a complicated mix of emotions and shame.
Jo Stanley (39:08):
I think profoundly we struggle to accept in life that things happen to us and that is so much a part of our journey from A to B, is things happen to us.
Jayne Tuttle (39:19):
We have no control and I’m very aware of that. Yeah, life throws funny things at you, and I feel like, yeah, I accept. I definitely feel a sense of acceptance at what happened. I had to in order to come at the writing of it. It’s definitely still a work in progress, it’s still a sort of weird grief, it still, honestly, there is so much I still don’t understand.
Jo Stanley (39:42):
Like it’s in the past, whereas it’s still very much in the present.
Jayne Tuttle (39:42):
It’s still well-
Jo Stanley (39:48):
But again-
Jayne Tuttle (39:49):
It’s in the past enough to be able to write it, and to feel fine, and to feel great about it.
Jo Stanley (39:53):
But you’re becoming, aren’t you? We’re all becoming, right?
Jayne Tuttle (39:55):
We’re all moving towards.
Jo Stanley (39:56):
So we say this is A to B, but B isn’t a destination or a full stop.
Jayne Tuttle (40:03):
Yeah.
Jo Stanley (40:03):
You’re being in this moment right now, but then you continue to grow from there.
Mimi Kwa (40:07):
And so what is your B, what is it for you, Jayne Tuttle to be?
Jayne Tuttle (40:15):
The beautiful thing about doing these things is you moving forward? I love growing old. I actually love getting old. I love it. And I love being able to sort of reflect on what it is I’m doing and what the point of me is or what the point of my being is. And I think I want to be more awkward, and more raw, and more real, and more vulnerable. These are the things that I’m terrified of and when I hit up against them, I struggle very hard as we all do. But I’m learning that the more that I lean into that, the more interesting it is. And I’ve definitely done that. I don’t know what else I’ve done with these books other than that actually, I’ve lent into that place now. I just want to keep going further. So I think naked. Yeah, I just want to be more and more naked as I get older, yeah.
Jo Stanley (41:18):
I Love it. It’s so great.
Mimi Kwa (41:20):
So what would you say to your younger self 15 years ago, after the accident, when you’re probably completely disorientated, recovering, not knowing where life is going to take you because it’s certainly not going to plan at that point. What would you tell yourself?
Jayne Tuttle (41:41):
I’d probably say just keep going because it gave me so much. The accident gave an incredible insight into the fragility of life, and death in life and really feel what it was to be alive. Just to feel my heart beating, not knowing if I’m going to walk again and just being like, it’s fine. I get to just have my heartbeat and I can understand.
Jo Stanley (42:04):
I mean, talk about just being. Like you’re in the moment, literally, because that’s all you can do.
Jayne Tuttle (42:08):
So I’d probably say… It was really hard. I’m not glossing over it. I’d probably just say, “Just keep going forward”. When I had the accident as is written in Paris or Die, this voice was in my head, which said, “Just keep looking forward, look at the wall, lie very still”. And that idea of just keep looking forward is really helpful. Don’t look too far in here, don’t get lost in here. Just keep your eye forward.
Jo Stanley (42:39):
Amazing.
Mimi Kwa (42:40):
I’m just speechless. It has been so incredible talking to you, Jayne. Just listening to your voice, reading your words on the page is one thing and you write, but you speak so beautifully too. You’ve just-
Jo Stanley (42:57):
Everything.
Mimi Kwa (42:57):
It’s been a lot, but it’s been amazing.
Jo Stanley (43:00):
Your ability to articulate just the human condition really is if anything’s going to happen for a reason, there’s huge impact in what you’re doing because of your experiences. So thanks.
Jayne Tuttle (43:12):
Thank you for listening.
Mimi Kwa (43:13):
Thank you.
Jayne Tuttle (43:14):
Amazing and thanks for reading, and listening, and asking the questions.
Jo Stanley (43:17):
Get the books. You must read them. Paris or Die, My Sweet Guillotine. Both of them.
Jayne Tuttle (43:23):
What do you say, guillotine?
Jo Stanley (43:24):
Guillotine.
Mimi Kwa (43:25):
Guillotine, I actually say guillotine, but I’ve noticed in events and stuff, people are like My Sweet Guillotine and I’m like, “Oh”.
Jo Stanley (43:31):
They’re trying to…
Mimi Kwa (43:32):
We’re doing our best.
Jo Stanley (43:36):
Doing our best at French.
(43:41):
Thank you for listening. We love you joining us for our A to B chats.
Mimi Kwa (43:45):
Yes, we do. Please see our show notes for our acknowledgement of country and all the people who help us put this podcast together, as well as interesting links to our guest’s work and other references we’ve mentioned.
Jo Stanley (43:57):
Such as your frequently unverified quotes.
Mimi Kwa (44:00):
Yes, I may still need to check a few of those, thank you.
Jo Stanley (44:04):
We’re Jo.
Mimi Kwa (44:05):
And Mimi from A to B. Rate, follow, and get in touch on our website.
Jo Stanley (44:10):
And let us know who’s A to B you’d like to find out about.
Mimi Kwa (44:13):
We can’t wait for you to hear our next conversation.