Joining me on the podcast is my friend Cassandra Neyenesch, a Brooklyn-based writer, whose debut novel, A Little Bit Bad, comes out next May. Cassandra is also the founding director of Abortion Stories, an organization that provides safe, supportive spaces for people to tell their abortion stories in the context of art and performance
Cassandra’s work has appeared in The Guardian, Brooklyn Rail, the Huffington Post, Public Books, The International Herald Tribune, and Art in America.
A Little Bit Bad is available for pre-order at your preferred bookseller.
(We discuss the 1994 indie film Go Fish, and Cassandra’s piece about watching the movie with her daughter is worth a read.)
Edited excerpts from our discussion:
CASSANDRA: Yeah, I guess about a year before Roe v. Wade was overturned, I had this weird moment. I just a voice told me, you have to have a festival about abortion stories … So a friend lent me their gallery and we had a little art show and then we had a storytelling event in the park.
And then we also had some comedians and some music and various things throughout the weekend. Recently we just did another one which was not just abortion, it was bodily autonomy more generally where we were talking about how all these issues about the fight to be in control of one’s own body is an issue that we’re facing on a lot of different levels and we need to be united and fighting for [it as one issue].
One of the things that I really loved about the first festival was a lot of women came out who had to seek illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade. They were furious and upset because the festival, just by coincidence, ended up taking place a few days after the Dobbs decision was leaked, basically essentially saying that Roe v. Wade was going to be overturned.
And these women [said] I’ve never told this story before. It’s very traumatic. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but I’m going to tell it now. Stories about having to get into … somebody’s car and go who knows where to have an abortion on a kitchen table. Stories about getting out of an abusive relationship, stories about being raped.
And my mother’s own story was something that I grew up with. So maybe this work came out of that. She had to help a friend get an abortion in 1960. They drove from Berkeley to Tijuana. Her friend was bleeding a lot on the way back. And my mom was really afraid that she was going to die. But the friend didn’t want to stop because she thought she would be arrested. [My mother] drove her through the night all the way back to Berkeley bleeding and then took her straight to the infirmary at school. And the doctor looked my mother in the eye and said, your friend is having a miscarriage. Isn’t that right?
They’re living people now who can testify what it looks like to live in a country where there’s no abortion access and what that can do to people’s human rights. And we should be listening to them.
