Love is a Burning Thing

An Interview with Nina St. Pierre

Cate Clother: At first glance, Love is a Burning Thing seems to be a book about your mother’s story: her self-immolation, her spirituality, her mental health, her place in the world as a woman seeking to live a self-determined life without labels or definitions. But it is equally about you, the story of your own tender unfolding, and your intimate and tenuous relationship with your mother. As “she was studying the divine,” you were “studying her–the scripture of a mother adrift.” Like you, and your mother, this book contains multitudes! I’m wondering how you came to the title? What does it mean to you?

Nina St. Pierre: The title came much later in the process.The next title was “Ring of Fire” because I wanted to reference the landscape in some way—Mount Shasta as part of the Ring of Fire–and it also referenced my mother, her beliefs and her mental state. But people thought it was too on the nose for the Johnny Cash song. 

My ex-girlfriend asked if there was a different line in the song I could use. (Although it had never really been about the song, it was about the volcanoes.) We put it on and the first line was “love is a burning thing.” I got full body chills. It was the title. It encapsulated the burning, but as you said, also my story and the creation of this book, which feels like an act of love.

A lot of people have asked me at book events about love. They’ve said that I’m very honest and blunt about my mom's mental state and reveal a lot of sensitive things, but that in the title is “love.” To me, this is love. Attempting to tell my whole complicated truth was actually an act of devotion. Love is not always a gentle, soft thing—sometimes it's a burning thing. [Laughs.]

Cate: Totally. And that brings to mind a theme in many stories of childhood trauma—silence. In my own family, I was taught that to talk about a problem, or to investigate it, was not loving; that silence was the loving action. Through the process of writing your story, did you discover that love isn’t silent, that it’s actually a powerful, burning, truth-telling thing? 

Nina: My mother was not an evasive person. She was  more confrontational than avoidant. She would say her piece and be loud about it if she needed to. That said, the problems and their effects on me were not directly looked at. And people in my family and others around me weren't acknowledging those things. So even though my mother was very outspoken,  in some ways that kept people from questioning her, because she was a woman of agency. But I do relate to the ways in which silence creates a sort of vacuum and how hard it is as a child, and then a teenager, to make sense of the past, and to even call it abuse. Abuse to me, always felt very active. Like something is happening to you, maybe there's violence or sexual abuse. My therapist showed me that a lot of what happened was actually neglect, not abuse. It was the absence of something. “Oh, that's actually neglect,” which made me sad and ashamed, almost. For some reason, I find “neglect” a more tender, soft word. 

I'm sure trauma has informed my practice as an artist. When you grow up with so much silence around things that you can tell are not right, for me it translated into a dogged commitment to looking at and naming  the thing. To saying it aloud. I'm probably hyper-vigilant in some ways now, but I think an artist's job really is to look and be as honest as we can. This book demanded it. My medium for over a decade was looking. It transformed my relationship to art and to speaking and to truth. For me, love is being honest and love is speaking and love is putting whatever it is on the table and trusting that we can work with it. That's not always available in our interpersonal relationships, but as an artist, you can do that for yourself.

Cate: Throughout your life you existed as “a girl divided,” with a foot in very different worlds: urban/rural, rich/poor, east/west, home/flight, heaven/earth. The stark contrast was highlighted in your experience as a young child living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district while attending White Pony, a private school run by Sufism Reoriented, a mystical branch of Islam, in the suburbs:

“As I traveled between two worlds each morning, shifting from the hard, bright urgency of the city to the serenity of White Pony, I began to sense that one did not translate to the other. That they never would, exactly, and that no one from either world could be expected to understand. Little by little, I tucked these disparate ways of being, moving, speaking, into me.”

After leaving San Francisco for Siskiyou County in far northern California, you were split between a life of rural poverty with your mom, a comfortable, middle class existence with your dad in his TM community in Texas, and an upper-middle class experience with your paternal grandparents in Miami. In each place you had to present yourself in specific ways. Can you tell us a bit about this inner experience as a child constantly asked to shape-shift? And how do you relate to this identity now?

Nina: Much like what we said before about silence, the thing that was hardest for me growing up has ultimately become my strength and that is the ability to adapt. It's also the capacity to empathize and approach people in a non judgmental way. It doesn't mean I don't have my subjectivities and biases, but I think all of those “in-between” experiences really informed my work. I’m no longer between home and away, east and west, but the feeling of existing “between” is part of me. 

I think it has allowed me to make connections intellectually or artistically between people or places or ideas that might seem disparate to others. As a child, I did what I needed to do. Children are little acrobats. They know how to get the love that they need, even if they don't know what they're doing.  When people call kids old souls, or say they're precocious, I get very protective. Don't put that on them, I think. Yes, they might demonstrate certain  characteristics, and sure, they might be more advanced intellectually or socially, but they are still children. The adaptability I had as a child, which had its own collateral damage personally, serves me as an artist.

Cate: Do you think some of that adaptability came about from just growing up in Siskiyou County? In the book you talk a lot about the “good old boy” community–the cowboys, and the Christian right–and compare that with the New Age spiritual community…it's such a mashup here. 

Nina: It is. For such a small place, there is a diversity–I'm not talking about racial diversity by any means, it's a pretty white region. But there is a diversity of mindset that you don't expect to encounter in rural America, and that's what I think is so unique about the region and why I wanted to come back for high school. There is something very grounded about it, something very down to earth, and maybe that's about class, maybe it's about poverty on some level? But I agree. Out in the world, I have an ability to connect to a diversity of folks that someone who grew up in a more homogeneous culture might not. 

Cate: I often come back to a quote by Paul Cezanne, “The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.” Or in other words, landscape creates mindscape. I’m wondering if this is relatable to you?

Nina: Yeah, I definitely relate to it. I had never heard that quote before, but I think that's a part of what I was really trying to capture in this book. I was trying to find a balance between my story and my mom's story. How much family background do you need? How much context about New Ageism do you need? To me landscape, specifically of where we come from, of Siskiyou County, of Mount Shasta, of Weed; the minutiae of all these little towns, and the ecology of the area was so important to capture. The land itself, the smell of the pines, taking a long drive up to the mountain, always having the threat of a volcano that could erupt at any time. 

Also thinking about the ways in which different people who have inhabited the area and interacted with the landscape, including the history of extraction of  natural resources. All of that informs mindscape. It informs the culture–especially of white settlers. It informs their relationship to the place, and their politics, and what or who they're going to vote for. In some ways, landscape is always mindscape, because it depends on your orientation to the land around you.

For me personally, there was something about the small town experience–partying in the woods, listening to hip hop, that wouldn't have happened in the same way or had the same sort of gravitas or mysticism if I had been a kid in the suburbs or living in the city.

Cate: My mother had severe addiction issues, which we won't get into here, but I remember thinking as a child that she just needed to get the hell out of here. We lived down in a dark canyon, in Dunsmuir, and I remember just looking up at these canyon walls and thinking, this was why she was losing it. There’s a point in your book where you say that the Wintu people, who are  indigenous to the area–said something like staying  on the mountain too long could drive a person crazy. Its energy was too powerful. Did you ever blame this place, this landscape, for your mother’s mental illness?

Nina: She blamed the place! It's funny because she was always saying that. Her whole thing was like, I gotta get out of here. It was different for me because we came to Siskiyou County after moving so many times. We moved there when I was in first grade. By then I had already moved something like 12 times. I really imprinted upon that place, and it became home to me.

We left for two years during junior high and lived in Southern California. But I missed my friends up north and begged her to move back, which she did for my high school years.  It probably would have been better for my mom's mental health if we had never come back.  She seemed sharper in the city. We had to use public transit, she was communicating with different kinds of people. Living in New York now, I can be super depressed or in a weird mood, but when I go out in the world,  it snaps me out of that. I have to be alive and alert. I think there's something to the slow grind of poverty in a rural place that chips away at you, and it definitely chipped away at my mother. I can't say if her mental health would have been sustained in a city or not, but I do think that the rural isolation and the judgment you can face in a small town, wasn’t healthy for her. She did not fit into a traditional box as a “woman.” So I wonder how it would have been if she was around more diverse and lively communities or had more access to resources, etc…If I had stayed in the city through high school, I probably would have been much better off in life as well. I would have done more creatively. I would have saved brain cells and not partied so much. My brother, too, might have been better off. Had more opportunities in school and sports. 

I did feel guilt later that I had asked her to return. But it was the only place that ever felt like home to me. There was something about my friends there. A “homeness” that I never felt anywhere else. And I desperately wanted and needed that because of the other instabilities. I couldn’t telescope myself into the future and consider my mom's mental health. I wish I could have, but I suppose that wasn’t my job.

Cate: In trying to piece together your childhood, you come to question your mother’s mental health, and try on different names and diagnoses, including schizophrenia. One word that really jumped out at me was “mad.” Could you say a bit more about this title, the “madwoman” archetype, and how it is being reclaimed by intersectional feminists today?

Nina: I don't want to speak too much to the mad activism movement because I'm not an expert–my research on that came later in the game when I was trying to provide cultural context for some of my  revelations. From what I understand, reclaiming the idea of and language around madness is part of the movement to decolonize psychiatry. What my mom was experiencing–potentially delusional thoughts and hallucinations–have been understood and valued in other countries and cultures at different periods in time. People experiencing these states of mind have not always been seen as “mentally ill” or in need of intervention or medication. In some cultures, they have been considered seers, with access to the spirit realm and important messages to provide to their communities. So I think it’s about the reclamation of the term mad, which was used in a derogatory way for a long time. Similar to how queer folks have reclaimed slurs to be used amongst themselves. For people who identify with the term “mad,” calling themselves mad or speaking out about madness reclaims language that was used to hurt or ostracize them at certain points in history. 

In her essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang writes about a whole person mentalility. There’s this pervasive idea in the dominant Western culture that if you can cure the disease or illness, then the “mad” person will become who they really are. To my understanding, the mad activist model is saying no, this is the person in their entirety. And we are autonomous. Mental illness then is not separate from the person themselves, but an essential part of who they are.  Some choose traditional psychiatry, some choose to medicate. And other people do none of the above. But it's not a right or a wrong choice. It's a movement centered in autonomy, in which each person has the right to make decisions for themselves. 

Things can get slippery when people are in delusional or as some call them, “altered” states, but that's a whole different conversation. We need better social structures to support folks who are having these experiences without criminalizing or ostracizing them. The central idea of all this is that everything that exists inside of a person, including their madness, is who they are. The ultimate goal is to make space for whole people. For people like my mother, it’s learning how to manage these altered states in a culture that doesn't create space for them, or is quick to pathologize. It's really about shifting the culture and not the person, which is big work for us all. 

Cate: Your spiritual experiences were so varied as a child. You describe a moment where you have a wake up call and stand on your own feet for the first time, when you demand to leave an Evangelical beachside worship service. This feels like a turning point in the book and in your life. Could you share a bit about this pivotal moment, and how it made its way into the book? 

Nina: That is a scene that every single person who read drafts of my book–I'm talking my longstanding writing group, my agent, even my thesis group in graduate school–literally everyone suggested I take that scene out. They thought it seemed random and unnecessary. It wasn't resonating. But I knew that there was something to it; it was a turning point. It was  when I saw that all these different spiritual modalities and teachings that I'd been open to, and opened to by my mother, were, in a way vehicles for relinquishing my selfhood. On the brink of teenhood and puberty, there was weird tension between wanting to let go, and wanting to believe the path that my parents had oriented me toward,  that there is some higher universal meaning to life, that some other place the earth is more beautiful and glorious, even that enlightenment is possible). Just being here as we were was not good enough. Part of me wanted to believe that so badly because isn't it just a wonderful idea? Isn't it a relief to think, oh, if we just do XYZ, if we pray, if we are good people, all this shit will make sense. All this shit will be for a reason. Did I want to believe that? Of course! I wanted to “let go and let god;” to be free of the  stress and anxiety over how things would work out in our lives.  If you grew up with a singular belief system, you don't have much to compare it to, right? You might eventually have a crisis of faith, but even then you're just looking at that one system.. Because I'd been exposed to such a range of religious and spiritual beliefs and practices maybe I had a premature crisis, or my analysis, at least, was broader. I’d had more input; more data! That day at the beach, I really gave myself to the experience. As I felt the crowd swaying and chanting, there was something electric. And I was still open to it. I thought, yes, this is it, let yourself go, give in, be happy, be filled with the Holy Spirit. Or whatever.

But when I looked around and saw the same people speaking in tongues, I turned to my mother and asked what it was.  The way she brushed it off, just as casually as she’d brought us to the service in the first place, something like, I don't know, they say it makes them feel close to God, pushed me over the edge. I couldn't handle it anymore. If all this shit is made up, I thought, what are we doing? This is nuts. You're yanking me around to all these different things. I did want something to believe in, but after that a door sort of slammed shut in my consciousness. I think it pushed me over the edge because it was the closest that I had gotten to giving myself over to the divine, to really feeling it. I was more disillusioned because I had felt something real that day. So I rejected it, and that really set the stage for what came next.

Cate: I could so relate to this moment because I've experienced a beachside worship service, where they've got the rain sticks, and they’re creating a whole vibe and it feels so right. You're by the ocean, and there’s all of these gorgeous blonde people. And when things in your own life feel so out of sorts, you think, this could be me, this could be my thing. But then you realize that everything is in place to make you feel this way. 

Nina: Yeah, it felt like a manipulation versus a true communing with spirit, which I do believe exists.

Cate: Thinking about all of your other formative spiritual experiences in context of that worship experience, like your gorgeous mystical Islamic kindergarten, your initiation into Transcendental Meditation, your Catholic Catechism, and all of the trappings of your mother's New Age practices…You just have this wake-up moment, realizing you’ve been hoodwinked; that this is all the same. What follows is a powerful realization that out of all of the places you’d called home, Siskiyou County was actually home to you. And you longed to go back When you all moved back, partying seems to have become your new access point for spirituality, or as you call it at one point, oblivion

Nina:  I loved the show Euphoria, I was obsessed with it and wished I had created it. I think I could have created it! I could have written that story, not skillswise I’m saying–just that I know that story. People who didn’t like it or found it offensive, were like, this is over the top, the sex, the drugs, it’s exploitative, unnecessary, etc. These are teenagers, they said, there's no way. I just thought, you have no idea. In Siskiyou County, we had the wilderness version of Euphoria. Everything was so raw and real. That show captured it so well.

Cate: The title Euphoria reminds me of the point in your book when your dad explained to you that drugs and alcohol were a shortcut to transcendence, but TM was the long haul. Looking back, do you think you were creating your own transcendence, your own spiritual experience, through these substances? 

Nina: Totally. I feel like I have done that off and on throughout my life. To the detriment of my internal organs! You know, I have found some sort of oneness, or singularity, some sort of connection, a form of transcendence, through sex and substance. Maybe people would say, what you're talking about is devil stuff and we're talking about heaven stuff. Or darkness and light. What I'm saying is that in the body they don't feel that different. 

Cate: I’ve studied a lot of early Christian artwork and so much orgasmic imagery was used when portraying union with God. I’m thinking especially of “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.”

Nina: Yeah, it's very erotic–the whole thing. Most religions throughout history have had their mystical offshoots, their weirdo crew, having deeply hermetic or erotic experiences in communion with the divine.

Cate: There's a book by Matthew Fox called One River, Many Wells. He describes a spiritual flow or river throughout the world and that we're all trying to tap into it. So each culture, each person, builds their own well to reach the water. Maybe the backwoods parties were one way of trying to reach it. So this leads me to this question about dance.

When you describe your experience of dancing, it also feels like a kind of spiritual devotion–the Mevlevi, or whirling dervishes, comes to mind, and seeking transcendence through movement. You describe leaving dancing behind when you started partying in high school, which kind-of displaced it, and that the caring adults in your life should have picked up that something was wrong when you stopped dancing. Have you come back to dance? If not, is there something else that lights you up? 

Nina: I've been hitting some walls in my personal and creative life, especially after releasing the book. Every time I sit and meditate, which I was doing very regularly for a while, I get the message thatI have to return to dance. For a long time I felt weird dancing. I've done adult classes off and on throughout my life, and I felt some grief about it. I would go to classes and I couldn't just have fun. I would be judging myself on where I thought I should be skill-wise, and grieving what I had given up. At some point, it became an idea of what I had given up. I was mourning this unarticulated loss. Slowly, I'm returning to a relationship with dance, which is playful and fun. This year, I've been dancing a lot in my house by myself and getting back into that. I wrote on my to-do list for 2025, JUST DANCE. It connects me to my body, and to the erotic, however we interpret that. I'm thinking less about sex per se, and more about Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic, a profound essay about embodiment in all its forms. 

Other than that, the things I always loved haven't changed. In New York, the closest you get to the forest is a big park, and I currently live near the biggest one. I’ll walk to the most remote parts of the park and just wander and pretend I'm in the forest.

My practice as a writer really feeds me. And, you know, just going out in the world, living in this city is exciting. There's the museums, the art, you have random conversations with strangers about anything and everything. The city is everything, really. 

Cate: I fell in love with all of these funny, amazing characters in your book. You begin as a young child in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, describing your neighbors through a child’s eyes. You clearly get across just how much love you felt for your community Personally, I've had this spiritual search throughout my life and I always come back to people. I find this connection to the higher whatever, just through people. 

Nina: That's it. I keep returning to the power of conversation. Yes, I'm an artist, but at the core, and maybe it’s why I didn't feel like a capital “A” artist for a long time, is that actually, I'm a communicator. I'm most driven by and interested in connection. I'm curious. I want to talk to you. I want to hear about your life. I want to think aloud about what it is to be alive, with other people and hear how they are existing in and interpreting this weird experience we're all having. 

You can feel it when you meet people like that. People who are open and real. We don't always have access to reflection and the more esoteric introspection because life is a lot. And we have our responsibilities and our shit, but often those conversations are enough to keep me going if my other needs are met, you know?

Cate: I love the way you describe your mother–she's just jumping off the page. She had this really funny and irreverent way of speaking. She's really down to earth even with her head in the clouds. She spoke freely with people the rest of the world had written off. You describe her as being able to create sacred spaces everywhere she went. Can you tell us more about this aspect of her and how you've come to understand it now as an adult? 

Nina: I think that was my mom's greatest strength and power, what you're talking about. And I think I directly took that from her. We inherit positive and challenging aspects from our parents, right? Unfortunately, we don't get to choose which ones. But that strength, which I inherited from her, is actually one of my core values and definitely a testament to her. I think it takes enough time and distance to heal and  recognize that the parts of our lives or selves that challenge us can become our greatest strengths. Not to be so cliche about it, but all that movement and adaptability, my mother really modeled that for me. When I was young, I resented some of it because I didn't really have a choice. 

I just wanted to sit with my friends and have new name-brand shoes and make up little dances. I wanted life to be stable and secure and “normal.” I didn't want to be in the Tenderloin or a motel, or constantly changing schools. But my mom…There's something to the core of this answer that I can't quite get to? 

Her way of being in the world was not just her personality–maybe at times it was part of a pathology–but it was also her ethic? When I say that my mom was for the people, I mean she was for the people. And that was always a powerful model for me and it's something that I really aspire to and look up to. I aim to be able to embody that ideal without all the dysfunction. This is a really important question. I can't quite say it all, I don’t know But I love the question, and I'm going to think about it more! 

Cate: You call your mother your “never ending story.” Does it feel like this story has finally reached its natural conclusion?  Can you tell us a bit about the experience of writing this book, and of it being out in the world? 

Nina: I hope it’s concluded because I have nothing left. We don't ever really get to “close the book” on our lives and our upbringings, but this is now my past. It's not me. The process of writing this book allowed me to metabolize and process and eventually make art. And that was a beautifully therapeutic process. Some memoirists balk at their work being called therapeutic or cathartic, and that is totally their prerogative, but for me it just was. It became art over time but it was also sort of an exorcism. It’s largely what made me, but it's an old story now. I'm not living in it anymore, so I'm grateful that it exists in this imperfect book of my heart, a book that I still want to change so many parts of, but that I had to let go because the time was up. While recording my audio book, I realized that why I wanted to keep changing the text again and again, in what a colleague called my tendency to over-optimize, is because I couldn't change what happened in the living of it.

Writing this book brought me closer to the brink of mental collapse than I've ever been, to be perfectly honest. I didn't have a sense of the process because when I first started writing it, I was just writing to reflect back to myself what had happened in my life. I didn't have a clear sense of what was next, but over the years the creation of this book became  the central driving force in my life. For almost a decade I orbited it. Side quests popped up along the way, but getting this book out into the world became my primary goal. I prioritized it over pretty much everything else, for better or worse. It became my primary relationship. What began as a raw reckoning with my past, somewhere along the way became a professional goal. As I went on to get an agent and a publisher the story became more of a product, so as I was refining the sentences, I was thinking about craft and readership. In the final stages, I was quite distant from the raw emotion and impact of the story. 

It wasn’t until the day that it came out and I was in the backseat of an Uber on my way to a dinner with friends and family who’d come to town for my book launch, that I broke down. I was clutching a copy of the book as the car moved through Brooklyn neighborhoods and I thought of moving east, and my life here, and everything I’d done to get to this point, and it hit. Oh my god, I did it. I really did it.

At my launch, reading about my mother’s burned skin, internally, I was sort of in shock. Like, what did I do? I can't talk about this stuff in public! It really wasn't until I began to do readings from the book and go on tour that I realized what I had created and how impactful and deep and emotional it was for people hearing the story for the first time. And that was a whole other part of the process. The closing of the loop I suppose. It made me emotional about my own story all over again. 

I imagine this is not what it's like to publish a book for everyone? But it was the great adventure of my life. I’m so grateful. And I'm also so glad that it's over. I honestly hope that no other book I write requires that, because that was total body, mind, and spirit occupation for a decade. But I did it. 

Cate: You say in your book, “In writing I could tell myself the things I'd been waiting for others to say: You are here. I hear you. This matters. This meant she meant something. You mean something.” Do you feel this now, holding your book in your hands? 

Nina: I'd love to just say, yes, that's how it feels when I hold this book and I have communion with it, but it's really not just about the book anymore. It's about the people reading it. My memoir is not static. It comes alive in relationship with its readers and how they interpret it, their subjectivity, their background, what they bring to it. So it’s actually through them that I can see myself. It's through people reflecting back to me or sending me a little message, or if I'm giving a reading, hearing what resonates with their lives. In a way, those moments reconstitute what I lost as a child, all that I attempted to gather in this book.

The book was the first thing, but what continues to feed me is the people reading it. We have an unspoken communion, a connection through time and space, because as they read the story and feel seen, they become what I wish that I had when I was younger. Someone who could reflect back to me what was; who could see it and say it frankly. Early on in the process of writing, simply acknowledging what was, what had happened, was so powerful for me. At different stages along the way, this book absolutely did make mine and my family’s story matter. In a way, it did, or I guess, I did for myself, what others could not. And now, the readers continue to do that for me, and I for them, and hopefully it's sort of a looping relationship that will go on and on.