Paths Crossed: Nina Renata Aron

The author of "Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls" gets candid on addiction, codependency, and creating a "chill as fuck" household on the other side.

On a Sunday morning last month in Oakland, California, Nina Renata Aron and I sat at her kitchen table in our PJs, clutching our cozy coffee mugs, the beans brought in from Zabar’s (you can take the girl out of New York…). I’d been imagining this scene for ages—since the time that Nina and I first met virtually, mid-pandemic, while working together at Departures magazine. I’d coveted everything about this woman’s home, conjured through her weekly words on all things cooking, kitchenware, candles, ceramics, you name it.

While she’d never claim such a thing, my colleague turned good friend is a multihyphenate: a whip-smart and creative writer, editor, memoirist, punk-rock musician, mom, athlete, bookworm, and culinary wizard. Essentially, my girl crush on Nina has been solidified with each new hang, from Facetimes to writers’ retreats, from humor-filled heart-to-hearts in hotel rooms to grocery missions at Berkeley Bowl (a good shop brings Nina great joy).

Her path to the present has been long and winding, as told in her vivid, brave 2020 memoir, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls. The book is about the nature of addiction, but from the perspective of the codependent: “Addiction is also necessarily a relational condition. In all but the most abject circumstances, someone is…cleaning up the mess. Someone is sitting by the window waiting. Someone is believing, hoping that today might be different.” Her personal story is threaded with the academic, as she gives well-researched, historical context to heartbreaking complexities. We all live within the complexities of love and the human experience, and this is what Nina and I get into here. Here, on the other side—with her son, daughter, and supportive, sweet partner milling about in the other room, in a house now built on calm, healthy pillars.

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I feel like you’ve lived many lives. In the present moment, how would you introduce yourself?

I think my primary identities are writer, feminist, mother. I love doing lots of other little things that might be classified as hobbies. I love cooking, and I love playing music, and I love playing soccer.

You call them hobbies yet I see you dig in so deeply to them. I love that your kids, independent of me, just similarly teased you about the gourmet meals you whip up, “Oh it’s nothing.”

I wish I had more time to devote my life to food, so that I would not feel like a dabbler and would feel like a bakery owner or something like that.

Have you always been a doer? When I worked at Departures and edited your pieces, I thought, Who is this woman!? She’s a mom of two; a memoirist; plays in a band; writes about food, baking, and every pantry item and kitchen tool to mouthwatering end; somehow reads multiple books a week; and churns out articles full time for this magazine.

I think now it comes down to the things I love. I used to be a doer in part because I was a people pleaser, and I was a middle child, and I felt a lot of pressure to achieve. I felt like I had to make everybody happy. And as I've gotten older, the codependency work, the recovery and sobriety, have led me to whittle my life down to the things I really love. And those things don't feel like work. I mean, it sometimes feels like a pain in the ass to get up at six a.m. to play soccer on a Sunday morning, or to shop to cook a huge meal, but it's powered by pure interest.

You gave me your memoir, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls, when we finally hung out in real life for the first time two or three years ago here in Oakland. It took me a while to crack it open, but when I finally did I was blown away—having only read the lighter side of your life and work for the magazine we were both at. How would you summarize your book?

Thank you! I would describe it as a memoir and cultural history of codependency. It tells a part of my personal story and looks more broadly at the gendered history of life alongside addiction. More than anything, it’s a book that takes the experience of being impacted by addiction seriously. I felt that hadn’t been done very much.

And what compelled you to write it at the time? Did it come to you all at once, or what was the process?

I’d been in a long, very difficult (and also often exciting) relationship with a man whose addictions and other demons had made him sick, unpredictable, untrustworthy, mean. And I realized, after years of trying to change or fix him, that I was also sick. I was going to Al-Anon meetings, which I’d done in my younger years, too, and I started researching the history of codependency. Once I learned more about it, I could see codependency as a sort of long historical condition—women living with alcoholic men goes way back—and the idea for the book really did come all at once at that point. I decided to try to write about my experience and situate it within this larger context.

I’ve been wanting to talk codependency with you. For my own selfish reasons too. While drugs and alcohol are not part of my family story, behaviors that stem from loving a parent with mental health struggles can manifest in the same way. Over the years, more than one person has mentioned that Al-Anon or CoDA [Codependents Anonymous] might benefit me.

Yeah, codependency is a really useful word, though some people think it's outmoded or inadequate to encompass all that we experience in relationships. But for me, it was the word that put language to a lot of experiences I had. It was kind of life-changing for me, personally, to see myself in it and use that framework to look at my life.

We’ve talked about all the good that our backgrounds and our parents gave to us, but how would you name the dysfunction that existed as well, that informed some of your path?

I think middle childness is a part of my story, but also my sister had an intense struggle with drug addiction when I was a teenager. That probably started when I was 13. So it really informed my adolescence and twenties. Fortunately, she's incredible and thriving, she survived it, and is one of the strongest people I know. But in that experience, I was really called upon to be like another parent. My parents’ marriage was faltering at that point, and I became kind of my mom's guy. That happens a lot in families where there's addiction. But that really was a training for me in how to be in a relationship with another person.

Yeah, that really becomes the formative model.

Yes. And it went on to become the template for my romantic relationships. I just felt like my purpose was to be somebody's emotional support animal.

That was my role too. I’m still unraveling it. It's annoyingly cliche that it all really does come back to the origin family stuff.

Totally.

But I feel like your journey is so stark versus the subtle ways that this stuff still follows me.

Yeah, I took it to the very limit by having a relationship with somebody who was an addict for a long time. Who I really thought I could fix. And that really brought me to my knees. I had to figure out a completely new way of relating to people. Because that backfired so catastrophically.

I’m proud to know you, how you’ve overcome it all, and in seeing the family and the love and the home you’ve now created for yourself. It’s inspiring to me within my micro and macro struggles too.

I think it doesn't really matter how extreme your experience is. It’s sort of whatever brings you to your knees. It could be just a minor imbalance in your relationships that persists and permeates different parts of your life. And in my case, it just happened to be extreme. Being with somebody who was extremely volatile and had extreme addictions to extreme substances. And who took a lot of risks and could be really scary. I just reached a point where I had tried everything to bring this person to heel. I was so focused on him. I was so focused outward.

Yeah.

And that was really convenient for me. Much, much easier than looking at my own shit. It’s icky to think about, but it was the same with my sister. It was very convenient for me to just be like, God, why does she keep messing up her life? With an implicit comparison to me. Why can't she just be more like me? And that enabled me to hide from the things in me that also needed attending to. I think if you grow—I mean, your growing is very stunted in that kind of dynamic—but if you stay in that dynamic, you can dodge yourself. Because you're always comparing yourself to somebody who's fucking up so grandly. It's very easy to be judgmental and shaming.

And then the joke is on you that it’s actually controlling behavior to try to make someone anything they're not in their journey.

Exactly. I just did this live event at a bookstore. The same thing came up. A woman asked what I have learned about care. I was saying that I think women derive a lot of personal feelings of power from believing that caregiving is this unidirectional thing. That we just give it and someone else takes it. So I think that I've learned that there's often something much more complicated going on there. Because people do also take a lot when they're giving care, deriving their sense of self from giving care to someone they perceive to be weaker or shittier. I think there's a slightly unhealthy emotional payoff for the person who's like, I just give, give, give, and they take.

Absolutely. You martyr yourself, but it's also due to the disconnection from self that has emerged from this role you took on, a role that at the time absolutely helped you survive your childhood in the best way you knew how.

Exactly.

Was it incremental or was there a specific mile marker you can pinpoint that helped you break through? Many things I read in your book could have been enough. Is there a clear moment that you were done beyond done?

It's fucked up to say it this way, but I think I was fortunate in that there was the threat of physical violence. There had been physical violence in our relationship. This person was very strong, very macho, and very scary when he wanted to be. And the very last straw was him saying that he wanted to punch me in the face, which is one thing he hadn't ever done. But the knowledge that somebody could and would probably eventually kill me started to feel really real to me. If you are igniting someone's rage by your mere presence, and they are an out-of-control, unstable person, you will eventually die if you're a woman and they're a man. You just will. And so when I look back on that, I feel really fortunate that that ingredient was in the mix.

Wow.

And not that I wish people were under threat of physical violence. But I see so many situations with girlfriends where I wish the guy was a bigger asshole. Because when somebody's that big of an asshole, the calculus is just a little bit clearer. But when somebody is doling out sweetness, kindness, friendship, a bit more than you are used to receiving, then what is the thing that would ever make someone be like, Fuck you, guy.

That's really interesting.

I do think that for women, that’s often a dark side of wellness culture. It’s very internet driven, often weak sauce. A lot of women I know have started turning the blame on themselves because they're just like, God, I consume all this content. I've read all the self-help books, I've done all the right things. I've been to therapy, I go to yoga. What is it going to take for me to make this change? But I think it is also worth putting the onus on men who are just not giving enough. They're non-committal. It’s a passive shittiness. But it’s still shitty.

And then you’re like, It's on me. I know the facts so it’s my responsibility.

Absolutely. So it fuels your own disappointment in yourself, your own low-key self-loathing. People are not bringing the goods yet we are blaming ourselves for not knowing how to navigate their inadequacy.

Your memoir is so exacting. I don't know if you find it cliché for people to call it brave. But it’s not something you read every day, the raw truths and admissions within living with a drug addict while your children are very young. It’s very vulnerable.

A part of me thinks it's the opposite. I look back on those choices which have now been made into a pretty story. Those were bad choices. They were good in the sense that I really quickly realized that conventional marriage with kids—the life that I was trying to fit myself into—was just not for me. It’s still not of interest to me. And I just didn't know that until I did it. I tried it and was like, Oh shit, whoops. But the people pleaser/codependent in me couldn't just say, Hey, you know what, this lifestyle is not for me. Instead I had to experience crippling depression, and then find my way out of that life via another man. Because I could never have said at the time: I want something different and that's enough.

Well we only had the tools in our tool belt that we had at each point.

For sure. Now I could do that, and now I would do that. Now if my relationship were fucked up, I would just be like, Bye, not interested. I just couldn't even articulate that at that time. Also because I was deeply in love with my husband. It was a real powerful love of my life. I have the tools to act on my own behalf now, but all of that was just so soaked in shame and indecision and confusion.

You write about sex in the hottest, most natural way. It viscerally stands out. It’s rare that I find an author’s descriptions of such things free of clichéd language and not contrived.

Thank you! You've said that to me before and it means the world to me. I feel I couldn't tell that story without it. That was the story of that relationship. I think that is what I was in pursuit of. It’s not really an accident—lots of insane, mentally imbalanced drug addicts are also very invested in that. But I'm glad I wrote about it, at least some. It was the draw and the way that I got hooked on that relationship.

But in some way it saved your life, is that right?

It did probably save my life. I chose sex over the marital march of desire dying—which I do think is just a part of marriage with children. Even though my marriage was very passionate and was a young marriage, I felt like I could see what was on the horizon, and I just couldn't bear it. I am a person who has had depression. And I experienced a lot of joy in my life, but I just thought, I will die. I will wither and die if I don't have a certain kind of lust in my life. So there is a place that sex occupies in my life. And that was very selfish to do with little kids. But it kept that part of my life alive, and probably kept me alive in some way.

And we can’t untether all those choices from exactly where we’ve now arrived. So have your kids [now almost 13 and 16 years old] expressed interest in reading the book?

They have an awareness of my book. But I’m just their mom. I’m not like, Hi, I wrote a book. Other people have asked them about it, and obviously they saw it around when it was published. A memoirist friend of mine has said that everybody always asks if their kids have read their book, or if they worry about that. And this friend was just like, My kids don't care what I do for work. I mean, maybe someday they'll be interested, but I'm not trying to be their friend the way my parents were my friends. I’m just trying to have a really parental parent/child deep bond with them, where I don't think they give a shit. I don't think they care that much about what I do for work. And I think that's really cute. I’m here to provide for them, not lean on them. They're also not that book motivated right now. They've grown up trying to find their way between towers and stacks of my books, so they're not into it.

I’m so glad I finally met your kids this weekend! They are so great. Empathetic, smart, curious people. I'm sure someday when they read it, it’s going to add to their picture of their mom as a resilient, badass human. I can see how much they look to you and enjoy your company. … [Enter Nina’s daughter on cue, showing us her outfit en route to a friend’s party. “Bye, Girl,” is Nina’s send off. And the way she’s been invoking this nickname somehow makes a generic word feel quite the opposite.] … What's your favorite part of being a mom at present?

God, good question. Seeing who they are with their friends and their loved ones, like their cousins. I love seeing them come into the joy of deep relationships with their friends. My relationships with my friends, which started in childhood, still carry me. That’s one of the best things in my life. I love seeing them having fun with people they've known for years, and putting effort into those relationships and reaping the rewards of those. I can see them being my age and still being friends with some of these people.

I love watching that with my niece too, who is now a junior in high school. And now, just for yourself, what would be a perfect day.

Ah, good idea. A perfect day would be waking up, playing in a really good pickup soccer game with good players. Coming home, taking a shower, preparing something delicious to eat, eating it while reading. Writing for a few hours, and then maybe watching some really bad television.

I should note that you have a great monthly Substack called Dollface, where you review books. What are you reading right now?

For one, a Norwegian writer whose name is Vigdis Hjorth. I really and truly love her books. They're really odd. They're very emotionally intense.

And I'm reading about the Arctic a lot right now. It's because of the mention of Franz Josef Land in one of your recent Paths Cross [with Andy Mann; love it]. That sent me down an Arctic obsession path. So now I'm gorging myself on Arctic things. I'm about to read Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams.

I almost never read a novel twice, but I just re-read Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed. She's Sigmund Freud's great-granddaughter. And the daughter of Lucian Freud, the painter. One of his many, many children. I read his biography recently, and he was really brilliant and really a dick. But anyway, this book is phenomenal.

What are you most proud of right now?

I'm proud of having a really calm household. I'm proud that my house feels like a sanctuary, where there are never loud arguments. There are never crazy emotional eruptions. The tenor of my household is chill as fuck. It's not anxious. It's just a calm space.

I fucking love that answer.

That was really hard as a Jewish, East Coast girl. And someone who's been through some shit. Cultivating everyday calm has been a major mission of mine. And I really feel like at midlife, I've nailed it.

That's awesome. You know I resonate, a fellow East Coast Jewish gal who grew up within dysfunction and those extremely volatile, emotional disruptions. Carried on the backs of our ancestors’ trauma I’m sure. And you’ve now been in this healthy relationship for a few years [psyched I finally got to put his face and an equally creative, whip-smart brain to his name]. It must have been so unfamiliar to you at first. Was there a light-bulb moment, like, Holy shit, I didn’t realize it could be this way?

Well, five years in, every day is a light bulb still. I just didn't know that this was available.

What made you not run from it?

A really good question. I think I did resist it for a while. My current relationship is far and away the best and healthiest relationship I've ever had. But I was still so traumatized from my previous relationship, so there were lots of ways that I tried to dodge things, or things would just make me burst into tears, or I would take space and not communicate about it, because I would just needed to protect myself from feeling vulnerable. And really, it was that I was with someone who was like, I'm just gonna hang in for this ride. So all of these habits and responses that I was so used to from a long, fucked-up relationship have gone away bit by bit. And we've unpacked them together, talked about them a lot. Everybody comes to relationships with their own baggage, so we've talked about his baggage too.

I'm almost getting emotional because that’s it—you don't know what you don’t know until you experience it. It can just take one person who is like, I’m not going anywhere. Who is affirming and patient and normalizes your feelings. I guess ultimately it starts to implant and override the decades of the alt scenarios and self-storytelling.

Yeah, I mean, it's really twisted, but it was somebody just being present and being really kind to me. I didn't know how to receive it. So it's a joke between us that for the first couple years of our relationship, I would often be like, Why are you being so nice to me? And I’d say it with such hostility. Or I would say, You're so nice. And he would say, I'm not that nice. I just really like you.

I’ve been in similar situations. And trying to break the cycle—heartbreakingly, I found old emails written by my mother also thanking people for baseline kindness toward her.

Yeah, it takes a few years to calibrate to somebody being wonderful after being conditioned to accept so little.

Also, I love your soundbite from last night, what was it? It feels like a sleepover every night with him?

It is! I’m so excited to just know we have the evening coming where we get to talk about the whole day, everything we saw, everything we did. Watch shows. All the things. We would probably be curling each other’s hair if he had long hair.