Marina Diamandis is out on tour—but this time, the setup is a bit different. With a rich and culturally pervasive career that has seen the singer-songwriter and performer release five critically acclaimed albums, Diamandis has now branched out into the world of poetry with her debut book, Eat the World: A Collection of Poems, for which she is currently doing a slue of live Q&As across North America and Great Britain.
V had a conversation with Diamandis about her latest creative output (to be released on October 29th), touching on dating, nostalgia, and exploring new mediums.
I’m familiar with your music and felt that these poems were somehow even more intimate, or more autobiographical somehow. Does that feel true to you?
I totally agree. I think one thing that I’ve just really enjoyed about writing this book is that I discovered that poetry gives you a lot more free reign, and I think I’ve been able to play with format a lot more, which is just very satisfying. I Think on a lyrical level, it enables me to speak more factually, which isn’t something that I ever really thought about with poetry. I think with songwriting, particularly with the type of artist I am, I love doing conceptual work. And so sometimes the autobiographical nature shifts a little in order to make room for fantasy, so that it’s tied up in a bow perfectly. That’s just the nature of writing pop music. But I think with poetry, I don’t know why, but it just helps me access a different part of my memory. And I don’t know, there’s not really any room for fantasizing or imagining. Everything is fairly factual in this book.
Quite a lot of the book is about your time as a struggling artist just arriving in LA, and even after that, there are still descriptions of hard times. Did you still feel emotions from those times quite deeply when you were revisiting them for this project?
That’s a really good question. I think the magical thing about writing is it helps you to access and revisit these parts of your life that might have been banished from your subconscious or conscious. I think, you know, maybe at that time, you’re not really able to deal with them. And something I’ve definitely been dealing with in the last year is revisiting these times that don’t feel fun to me. Like they talk about the shadow self—it’s all the parts of yourself that feel taboo in some way, or nonacceptable to you, and they remain covered. Because as you get older, those topics are given a chance to emerge so that you can integrate them into yourself and let them go.
And I think that’s definitely the case with some of these.
I saw something recently, just a random post on Reddit. I’m going to read the beginning of it to you and you tell me if it resonates: What you have to remember about the past is that it literally doesn’t exist. It exists only in your mind, and your memory is no more real than a daydream. What you also have to remember is that your memories are most likely not as accurate as you think they are. They are colored by your emotions and how you are feeling and colored by your memory itself.
It goes on longer than that, but do you sort of understand what it’s getting at?
I do know what you mean. I mean, I think memory is fascinating because it’s been proven that there can be in cases of trauma, particularly with let’s say, for example, childhood sex abuse. There’s a lot of proof that maybe up to a third of people have no recollection of what happened. But then there are other schools of thought about memory that, for example, maybe there are three family members that are all recounting the same event, but they’re all kind of different. You realize that maybe our memories aren’t serving us in the way we perhaps thought. But I think for me, when reflecting on the past, it’s not so much about exactly what happened. It’s more the somatic toll that it has taken, or the somatic effect that is ingering. I do a lot of bodywork and breathwork these days, alongside therapy. Because at the end of the day, all emotion is energy, and it gets stuck in certain parts of the body which can cause health symptoms. I’ve had to go through that on myself for my own reasons the past few years, so that’s what I would add. The details might not be so important.
It’s a little bit like Impressionism in that way.
Yeah exactly.
You talk a lot about love and dating in this book. How comfortable were you with broaching that topic?
It felt good because because you write it and maybe something surfaces, and you feel at peace with it in a way. But I did feel conflicted about having to show this less savory part of myself. Because the way I see it is that it’s kind of related to shame. You know, dating experiences, moving to LA, the beginning of the pandemic, coming out of a long relationship, and then finding myself in this sea of people or experiences that I really wasn’t familiar with. I think that interactions that aren’t really secure, because you don’t really know the person, have the ability to be very triggering for some people who have relationship wounds. I don’t really know why I felt or still feel some embarrassment about it. But I think the only way out is actually talking about it. And now I’ve written a freaking book about it.
Once you get past the initial embarrassment, it brings up how we view relationships in general. There’s this assumption that just because you’re married or in a long-term relationship it’s somehow healthy, which I think is really inaccurate. I think we’re all in different relationships for different reasons. One really powerful thing that I’ve developed because of this book and been able to work through is—and I’m going to try not to sound like a chliché—but i think when you really learn to be on your own, I think you are really able to harness a part of yourself that is just not possible when you’re in a relationship. Personally, I don’t want to date people for the sake of it. I’ve never been like that. So for me, it’s like I’m either 100% in or I’m 100% out. That means you’re going to be a bit pickier and you’re going to take your time.