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Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Jody Aliesan 
May 7 & 9, 1996  
Cassette 5, Side 1 
 
 
Julie O'Grady  00:04 
The date is May 7, 1996. I am Julie O'Grady, a student at the University of Washington, working 
on the Washington Women's Heritage Project. Today, I will be conducting an oral history 
interview with Jody Aliesan. Jody is presently residing in Seattle, Washington, and this interview 
is taking place in her home there. This is tape number five. 
 
Jody Aliesan  00:31 
I was just saying that I married a man because I was supposed to. I cried the morning of the 
wedding, uncontrollably. Um, my matron of honor had to go buy my first experience of 
tranquilizers to get me to a place where I could go through the ceremony. And, um, the wedding 
night is described in a poem that's in, uh, the book called "Soul Claiming." Um, while my new 
husband was watching a basketball game, um, I called my mother to thank her for all the effort 
putting together the wedding, which was more her-her wedding, that it was mine, and I lied, the 
first major lie to anybody about my truth, and told her I was fine and that I was happy. I realized 
that I was neither and I wasn't going to be.  
 
Jody Aliesan  01:28 
And after I got out of the marriage, which getting into it was the biggest mistake I ever made. 
Getting out of it was the best thing I ever did for myself. I remember talking to my brother, as I 
had gone to his graduation, and I made a mistake of-of, uh, assuming our intimacy and talking 
with him about my life. I've since come to understand he's really not interested in my life. He's 
interested in my being interested in his [laughs]. And I said, I told him I thought I was a lesbian. 
And he said, "You're just feeling sorry for yourself." It was one of those many moments as a 
reflective person, when I'm stunned by a response and don't really know what to say, and so I 
don't say anything in the time and the moment goes by. But that was such a strange thing for him 
to say, and I have talked with him about that since. Nobody understands my--how I felt.  
 
Jody Aliesan  01:28 
But without going into, uh, the relationships I've had, I will say that there, there have been four 
major relationships, but there have been many other, um, interactions with people that have 
gone--been everywhere from one-night stands to important friendships with a physical 
component, and that I have been sexually with around forty people in my lifetime. I'm-I'm-- 
When I am monogamous, I'm pretty good at being monogamous. There are times--have been 
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times in between long-term relationships when I've been I guess what one would say, would call 
promiscuous, although that word usually means, uh, to me, out of control in a self-destructive 
way. Now I have been there, but I've also been in places where there have been a number of 
partners and sexual expressions with, um, many individuals in the same span of time that wasn't 
self-destructive or destructive. A lot of the people who are unhealthy.  
 
Jody Aliesan  03:45 
But this notion of marriage, I've been married twice now, once to a man, once to a woman, and I 
find it interesting that they were separated in time by--well, from 1965 was the first one, and 
1991 was the second one. And they were both to very charming, charismatic people who, to the 
outside world, were socially skilled and funny and, um, energetic, but who, privately, were 
manipulative of me and selfish and even, and definitely cruel. So there were two, [inaudible] 
married one another. I think that I was prone, in both cases, to be swayed by their courtship. 
Their flattery, the praise, the feeling that they really saw and appreciated me. And I guess it 
happened the second time because I attributed that kind of behavior, just to men, and found out 
what I actually already really knew, but really found out, well, that it's human.  
 
Jody Aliesan  05:13 
Um. I remember flashbacks being in the car with my parents and my brother, and I was sitting in 
the back seat, and when we would come into the driveway, my brother and my father would get 
out of their side of the car, the left side of the car, to come around and open the doors for my 
mother and me. [Inaudible.] My brother was younger than me, but he was still the one to do that. 
This was middle school, maybe? High school at the latest, and-and I would be expressing 
impatience that I would have to sit there passively while somebody else walked all the way 
around to open my door. And my mother would say, "Now, let them be men." As if that behavior 
defined them as male and gave them their sense of self-worth. And so it was up to me to be 
generous and even sacrificial in order for them to feel good about themselves, which went along 
with her instructions about being a lady. I was supposed to be a lady. I think she's given up on 
that.  
 
Jody Aliesan  06:24 
But even then all together, that, um, behaving in a way with one's body or conversation or truth 
about oneself or about one's opinions of the world was unladylike. It was just the sense that 
being a lady was being tied up in a number of different ways at once, and she associated it both 
with femininity and with, uh, being of a social class above where we were, and also, of course, 
dress, how-how you dressed. She wanted very much for me to dress differently from what I did, 
and would try to help me make choices in the direction of what was female clothing. And female 
clothing made me feel ridiculous. It was vaguely humiliating, and also, especially after 
experience of sexual assaults, made me feel very vulnerable and attractive. Being attractive was 
dangerous. 
 
Jody Aliesan  07:30 
So, um... I would say, as a summary to all of this, after-- And I feel like that after having as many 
as experiences as I have, that I can make a generalization that has meaning, that I like sex, but I 
don't like sexual relationships. That something happens after two people cross the line into 
sexuality that ends up not being worth the pain and the effort. I realize that many people say, and 
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maybe they're right, that it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to include all the 
possessiveness and expectations and dissatisfactions and control games and drama and the hurt 
and the distraction from what we may be supposed to be doing with this life and humanity in 
general. Um, and that codependence and all of that doesn't have to be the norm.  
 
Jody Aliesan  08:37 
That may be true, ideally, and for somebody else, but it hasn't been true for me, and I'm not 
willing to take the risk of, uh, entering into, um, the possibility of all that again. I have other 
things I want to do, and I really Like how simple and productive my life is now. So I feel like 
with myself, I am a good couple. We are a good couple, or a trio or a committee, or however 
many selves I've got, but then as sexual partners, my body and the rest of me were a good 
couple, and um, we're-we're very good, and that's enough. And I guess it takes me full circle 
back to the--the grade school experience, [laughs] come to think of it. So I have regressed 
completely, and I'm totally immature, and it's wonderful. [They laugh.] That's that. 
 
Julie O'Grady  09:52 
That's that. Do you want to end here? Or do you want--did you want to look at one of these 
questions? Do you? It's up to you. 
 
Jody Aliesan  10:00 
Okay, I can say a couple other things that-that might be useful for the record, that you're not 
supposed to, um. You know, I was raised, saying that you're not supposed to say these things to 
anybody else about, you know, family. But I was thinking, what were the important things about 
my parents? And my own growth. 
 
Jody Aliesan  10:16 
And I would say about my father, what's important--what was important about him to me was his 
sensitivity, his sincere rejoicing in other people's success, even when his own was limited by so 
many handicaps, not only his hard of hearing and deafness, but I think he was very often ill and 
had had physical limitations early on in his life that had continued to influence him. Though he 
was a very straightforward, honest man. Um, and gentle and kind. He had his prejudices, and 
now and then he would blow up, but it was a very rare thing. What difficult about him, for me, 
was his passivity, which I couldn't understand, and is explained in many ways. He didn't feel 
power. He didn't express it. He didn't--wasn't someone you go to for refuge or expect protection 
from. He behaved as if, um, he were helpless in the face of the other person who influenced me, 
um--  
 
Jody Aliesan  11:05 
Well, of course, would be my mother. And I would say about her that what was really positive in 
my life was her sense of organization, her delight. Or, uh, I wouldn't-- Actually, that was not 
quite the right word, I would say, her, um, feeling responsibility about instruction, her 
satisfaction being an instructor. Responsibility would be the word. So that I learned to like 
learning from being around her. What was difficult about her, and continues to be difficult in 
different ways to the present, is that she also suffers from a couple of disabilities. One is, uh, her 
relationship with alcohol, and the other is that she is, I-I would like to say, a clinical compulsive 
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liar, just to be able to define it as something that she, in part, cannot help. In part, it's conscious, 
but it's a phenomenon that has affected my life.  
 
Jody Aliesan  11:28 
Things that I have been told about my past turned out not to be true, that I may have based some 
kind of self-understanding on, and things that she tells other people about me that aren't true and 
how I have to deal with that. None of it malicious, all of it an attempt to influence herself, first 
and foremost, and those around her, because it reflects on her. And then the other thing that is 
difficult about her--and I think this is partly the company she keeps most of the time in her life, 
and her desire to fit in with them or be liked by them, or whatever--is that she's a white 
supremacist. I mean, I mean that in small letters. Certainly we're all--we're all of us affected by 
racism in, um, in this country, all of us--of whatever race, we'll find roots of our behavior and 
our perceptions in that terrible systemized--systematized, um division of people that invites 
superiority and inferiority.  
 
Jody Aliesan  14:02 
But I think there's a difference between racism and white supremacy. The racism is based upon 
generalizations and prejudices about a group, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the person 
feeling those sees herself as better than or superior to that group or those people, or that 
individual representing the group. Whereas my mother, and for whatever reasons, and I don't 
have a lot of patience with trying to figure out why, like, "Okay, this really means inferiority." 
Well, fine, but the effects are what we're talking about here. She really behaves as if she feels 
that [clears throat] white people are superior. And-and-and expresses contempt for people who 
are not white. She knows better than to do that with me now, for a long time now. I first stood up 
to it in college, I didn't go along with it earlier than that. Haven't gotten into physical 
punishment. Another [inaudible], we get into it. But now it only slips out, but it slips out often 
enough as she gets older and has less control that I know it hasn't changed, because when, when 
she does say it, it's-it's obviously something she may just have said yesterday to one of [?your?] 
parents, and that is a terrible thing.  
 
Jody Aliesan  15:37 
I-I feel, uh--I guess this has also helped my sense of being a loner, separate, something of a 
misfit, solitary, and all the rest of it because I didn't find people in my family that I could 
unconditionally be proud of having as relatives, or that I could trust completely to want to give 
us up into their instruction, to be shaped by. And I was aware of that at a very early age, so I felt 
more kinship with, um, other species, really, early on than I did with human beings. And as my 
life has gone on, I'm one of these people who have a family of choice, and they're not the same 
as my relatives. No matter how much I might push that to be otherwise, and I've even attempted 
to make it be otherwise. Over and over again, I have to return to realizing that my relatives are 
not my family, and that's okay. 
 
Julie O'Grady  16:46 
Um, did you want to talk about those other questions?  
 
Jody Aliesan  17:09 
Um. [Pause.] 
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Julie O'Grady  17:09 
What do you imagine for the future? 
 
Jody Aliesan  17:11 
I don't imagine very far into the future. I guess so much has happened to me that has pulled the 
rug out from under whatever plans I was making, that, um, when I talk about plans, it's-it's 
mostly to satisfy people who need to hear me talking in those terms. What I imagine in the future 
is continuing pretty much the way I am now. I'm happy where I live, happy where I'm living, 
happy doing the work I'm doing now, the writing that I'm involved in at the moment. I'm grateful 
for the friends I have. Could do without an earthquake [laughs], and so I would really enjoy that 
and be grateful if the life that I'm living now just continued, and then whatever is supposed to 
happen next will unfold again, and [inaudible] changes, and I hope I have the strength and grace 
to ride them, and accept whatever instructions I get. But I don't have any plans. [Pause.] It would 
be nice to be, to continue in good health. 
 
Julie O'Grady  17:22 
Mhm [affirmative].  
 
Jody Aliesan  17:25 
Not only the physical. And I also, I guess I have relatively few goals. Once, I said to someone 
that I don't have any goals, I don't have any plans, and they were very concerned for me, and I 
was trying to communicate how content I felt [they laugh]. And right now, I would say that my 
only, uh, goal at this point is to complete this book I'm writing about the famine in a way that 
does justice to the people who died. And then right now I'm involved in some caretaking of a 
dear friend who, uh, had an aneurysm and a couple of strokes at the age of 52. A real--a brother 
buddy. He and I have been getting together as mutual political therapists for eight years now, and 
so part of my life is, um, today, for example, trying to round up some help to deal with the 
malnutrition he's suffering in the nursing home where he is. And also, so I have that. My goal, 
I'm having a goal there to-to be good friend to Stanley, who's been a good friend to me. That's 
not quite the same thing as a goal, though, because it doesn't have an end. Things like that can go 
on and on. [Pause.] And--what were the other questions you had? 
 
Julie O'Grady  19:47 
Oh. Let's see. How would you like to be remembered? 
 
Jody Aliesan  20:35 
Hm. I'll think about that. I don't have an answer right away to that one. What was the other one 
you mentioned? 
 
Julie O'Grady  20:48 
If you could sum up your life in a-- 
 
Jody Aliesan  20:49 
Yeah. Ha!  
 
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Julie O'Grady  20:49 
--few phrases [laughs], what would you say?  
 
Jody Aliesan  20:53 
Well, there was a time when I imagined an epitaph, which I guess is, comes the closest that I can 
to that right now. And it was, "She was passionate, for better or worse." 
 
Julie O'Grady  21:03 
[Laughs.] 
 
Jody Aliesan  21:05 
I'm not sure that fits right now. I'm not sure if I'm passionate. I think I've, uh, suffered the 
consequences of passionate enough to really agree with the Buddha that it causes suffering. And 
if you're willing to suffer, then go for it, enjoying that suffering. [Pause.] So I don't have an 
answer yet. I'll think about those, too.  
 
Jody Aliesan  21:43 
Okay. [Pause.] 
 
Julie O'Grady  21:43 
[Inaudible.] 
 
Julie O'Grady  21:45 
Okay, so we'll bring this to an end. [Tape clicks.] 
 
Julie O'Grady  22:03 
The date is now May 9, 1996, and I am continuing on tape number five, interview with Jody 
Aliesan. My name is Julie O'Grady, and we will begin now. [Shuffling sounds.] 
 
Jody Aliesan  22:29 
Well, uh, I got to thinking after the last time I mentioned, um, standing up to my mother's racism, 
didn't mention the anti-semitism, um, and the physical punishment. So I got to thinking about 
that. It happened that I called her the very next night because she came home from trip to visit 
her brother in Kansas. And it was hard to remember. I mean, it was hard to really believe, 
listening to this somewhat frail older woman, um, that at one time, I was afraid of her.  
 
Jody Aliesan  23:11 
But when I was growing up, she practiced, uh, very strong control and direction and an old-
fashioned idea of the authority of parents, which required obedience. Obedience that didn't 
question, and, um, was immediate. Uh, disagreement or standing up to her was seen as defiance 
and disrespect, insubordination, and it was not met in a rational way. It was met very often with 
physical punishment, spankings earlier in life and later, slaps across the face, once I was in high 
school, I was too old to spank. Or verbal punishment, which was, uh, ridicule or sarcasm, 
shouting, sneering at what I valued, dragging the past into the present to degrade me and put me 
in my place.  
 
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Jody Aliesan  24:21 
And this became more necessary as I got older, when I couldn't be intimidated by the spanking, 
especially when I stood up for myself, um, as I did when I felt I was unfairly punished or 
misunderstood on purpose, which happens most often when she'd been drinking. There would be 
punishment that was unrelated to me, out of the blue, or was exaggerated, where whatever I did 
was an excuse for her, um, blowing up and, um, releasing. And then there would be the 
exaggerated apology, often accompanied by tears and physical affection, which actually 
disgusted me, because I knew better than to trust it. It was just her way of feeling better for 
herself.  
 
Jody Aliesan  25:17 
And I remember coming to thec onclusion and saying so many words, "If I--if I can't have love, 
then I don't need it." And that has stayed with me in my life. Um, but even my holding out was 
seen as a--as a form of defiance. If I even showed disagreement in my face, it was called being 
hateful. So my response was, since there was nothing I could do about it and I was stuck in that 
family, in that house, my response was silence and withdrawal and stoicism, endurance and calm 
and detachment, holding on to my own dignity. And looking forward to getting out of there. I 
remember high school graduation, everybody crying and hugging each other and feeling sad 
about leaving. I--Oh, bring it on! [Laughs.] Get me out of here!  
 
Jody Aliesan  26:25 
So my response to the family was basically, it came down to realizing that standing up to her was 
going nowhere, and that I could do better things with my energy, not to mention my heart and 
my soul. And so I came to being able to stand up to her and actually confront her in as simple 
and loving a way as I could about both the drinking and the lying, much later, at a distance, so 
that when the wrath came, it was manageable and it would be only in the mail or over the phone, 
and I wouldn't have to-to deal with it, um, face-to-face on the one hand, or be in the same 
household with it.  
 
Jody Aliesan  27:11 
But I think these patterns have continued in my life, and at-at this point I guess I'll... I guess, I'll 
skip in a way to-to the two questions that-that you asked about, first of all, whether I could, um, 
if there were a few sentences that I could use to summarize my life. And the second was, what I 
wanted to be remembered, how I wanted to remembered? 
 
Julie O'Grady  27:40 
Mhm [affirmative].  
 
Jody Aliesan  27:42 
So what I've come to in the last couple days is that I can use one sentence to answer the first 
question, which is, I can't summarize my life in a few sentences. And the second answer would 
be that I'd like to be remembered by what I've written, because that's what my life's been about, 
and that will speak for me. All the complexity is there. Everything I haven't thought to talk 
about, and all the lurchings and blunderings and contradictions and ordeals, as well as whatever 
insights and connections might have come along, and I realized that wanting to be remembered 
by what I've written is actually asking a lot, because it's-- What the reality of, uh, the poet's 
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experience is that not much comes back, and that, um, you have to do it for reasons that are other 
than practical or rational, including the reason or desire or expectation that you're going to be 
read. I don't necessarily expect that what I've written is going to be read.  
 
Jody Aliesan  29:00 
And I remember--it was attributed to Mark Twain that "publishing a volume of poetry and then 
waiting for a response is like throwing a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for an 
echo." That's really true. We really don't hear much back. So, um, I feel like what I've written, 
both published and unpublished, including papers from college and grad school, will speak for 
me, and-and the papers do, because whatever I wrote about, I tried to look for a different 
approach or perspective that went beyond the subject, that could incorporate something about 
life, um, or the wisdom and the truth of human experience, because that's why I love literature at 
its best. That's what it would communicate. Um, my birth time and my chart. I guess I could 
include a chart here, because I feel like, um, like my astrological chart fits how I feel--[Tape 
ends.] 
 