by Alex Banayan
* * *
My sisters boiled down their questions into four obstacles. The first was how to deal with darkness. There’s an expression Maya Angelou coined called “rainbow in the clouds.” The idea is that when everything in your life is dark and cloudy, and there’s no hope in sight, the greatest feeling is when you find a rainbow in your cloud. So I asked Angelou, “When someone is young and just starting out on their journey, and she or he needs help finding that rainbow, in mustering the courage to keep going, what advice do you have?”
“I look back,” Angelou said, her voice soothing and wise. “I like to look back at people in my family, or people I’ve known, or people I’ve simply read about. I might look back at a fictional character, someone in A Tale of Two Cities. I might look at a poet long dead. There may be a politician, could have been an athlete. I look around and realize that those were human beings—maybe they were African, maybe they were French, maybe they were Chinese, maybe they were Jewish or Muslim—I look at them and think, ‘I’m a human being. She was a human being. She overcame all of these things. And she’s still working at it. Amazing.’
“Take as much as you can from those who went before you,” she added. “Those are the rainbows in your clouds. Whether they knew your name, or would never see your face, whatever they’ve done, it’s been for you.”
I asked what someone should do when they’re searching for rainbows, but all they see are clouds.
“What I know,” she said, “is that: it’s going to be better. If it’s bad, it might get worse, but I know that it’s going to be better. And you have to know that. There’s a country song out now, which I wish I’d written, that says, ‘Every storm runs out of rain.’ I’d make a sign of that if I were you. Put that on your writing pad. No matter how dull and seemingly unpromising life is right now, it’s going to change. It’s going to be better. But you have to keep working.”
Angelou once wrote, “Nothing so frightens me as writing, but nothing so satisfies me.” When I had shared that quote with my sisters, they’d said it resonated with them. In many ways, that applies to any kind of work you love. Briana’s passion for special education law had turned into her dream, but now that dream was turning into a cold reality of applying to firms and wondering if she was good enough. I brought up that quote to Angelou and asked how she dealt with that fear.
“With a lot of prayer and much trembling,” she said, laughing. “I have to remind myself that what I do is not an easy thing. And I think that’s true when any person begins doing what he or she wants to do, and feels called to do—not just as a career, but really as a calling.
“A chef, when she or he prepares to go into the kitchen, has to remind herself that everyone in the world, who can, eats. And so preparing food is not a matter of some exoticism; everybody eats. However, to prepare it really well—when everybody eats some salt, some sugar, some meat if they can, or want to, some vegetables—the chef has to do it in a way that nobody has done it before. And so this is true when you are writing.
“You realize everyone in the world who speaks, uses words. And so you have to take a few verbs, and some adverbs, some adjectives, nouns, and pronouns, and put them all together and make them bounce. It’s not a small matter. So you commend yourself for having the courage to try it. You see?”
The third obstacle was dealing with criticism. In Angelou’s autobiography, she wrote about joining a writer’s guild. She read aloud a piece she’d written and the group ripped it apart.
“You wrote that it pushed you to acknowledge that if you wanted to write,” I said, “you had to develop a level of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution.”
“In the next five minutes!” Angelou said, laughing again. “It’s true.”
“What advice do you have for a young person who’s dealing with criticism and looking to develop that same level of concentration?”
“Remember this,” she said. “I’d like you to write this down, please. Nathaniel Hawthorne said: Easy reading is damn hard writing. And that’s probably just as true the other way around; that is, easy writing is damn hard reading. Approach writing, approach whatever your job is, with admiration for yourself, and for those who did it before you. Become as familiar with your craft as it is possible to become.
“Now, what I do, and what I encourage young writers to do, is to go into a room alone, close the door, and read something you’ve written already. Read it aloud, so you can hear the melody of the language. Listen to the rhythm of the language. Listen to it. Before you know it, you’ll think, ‘Mmmh, it’s not too bad! That’s pretty good.’ Do it so you can admire yourself for trying. Compliment yourself for taking on such a difficult, but delicious, chore.”
Obstacle four was an issue Briana was confronting. As she looked for a job, every job description she found said, “Prior experience required.” But how could she get prior experience if all the jobs require prior experience? In Angelou’s autobiography, she faced a similar problem.
“I read when you were hired as the associate editor of the Arab Observer,” I said, “you bluffed your way into the job by inflating your skills and prior experience and, when you were hired, you had to really learn how to swim. What was that like?”
“It was hard,” Angelou said, “but I knew I could do it. That’s what you have to do. You have to know that you have certain natural skills, and that you can learn others, so you can try some things. You can try for better jobs. You can try for a higher position. And if you seem assured, somehow your assurance makes those around you feel assured. ‘Oh, here she comes, she knows what she’s doing!’ Well, the thing is that you’re going to the library late at night and cramming and planning while everybody does their thing.
“I don’t think we are born with the art,” she added. “You know, if you have a certain eye you can see depth and precision and color and all of that; if you have a certain ear, you can hear certain notes and harmonies; but almost everything is learned. So if you have a normal brain, and maybe a little abnormal, you can learn things. Trust yourself.”
I had one minute left. I asked if she had just a single piece of advice for young people as they launch their careers.
“Try to get out of the box,” she said. “Try to see that Taoism, the Chinese religion, works very well for the Chinese, so it may also work for you. Find all the wisdom that you can find. Find Confucius; find Aristotle; look at Martin Luther King; read Cesar Chávez; read. Read and say, ‘Oh, these are human beings just like me. Okay, this may not work for me, but I think I can use one portion of this.’ You see?
“Don’t narrow your life down. I’m eighty-five and I’m just getting started! Life is going to be short, no matter how long it is. You don’t have much time. Go to work.”
As time passed, I became even more grateful for this conversation, because if I’d waited much longer it wouldn’t have happened. Almost exactly a year after this phone call, Maya Angelou passed away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Sitting Down with Death
Months had passed since my conversation with Maya Angelou, and the solace she’d given me had washed away. I was experiencing a level of sadness I didn’t know I could feel. My dad had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
He was only fifty-nine. And I was watching him wither away. Seeing my dad’s full head of hair fall from his scalp, eighty pounds waste away from his body, and hearing him cry in the middle of the night filled me with a pain I’ll never be able to fully put into words. There was such a deep sense of despair, of helplessness, as if I was on a raft, looking out at my dad as he drowned in the ocean, spitting up water, and no matter how far I stretched my hand, I couldn’t reach him.
But as overwhelming as those thoughts were, this wasn’t the place to linger in sadness. I was now sitting in the lobby of The Honest Company’s headquarters, minutes away from interviewing Jessica Alba,
which meant that for the next hour, I needed to compose myself, focus on the mission, and stop thinking about death.
I was escorted down a hallway. Bright sunlight filled the open workspace. On one wall were a hundred bronze butterflies. On another were dozens of shining white ceramic mugs spelling the word “HONESTY.” Everything about the company seemed positive and upbeat, and I wanted the interview to be that way too.
As I turned a corner and approached Jessica Alba’s office, I reflected on the magnitude of what she’s accomplished. She’s the only person in Hollywood history to simultaneously be both a leading actress and the founder of a billion-dollar start-up. The Honest Company has grossed $300 million since its inception and her movies have grossed an estimated $1.9 billion worldwide. She’s also the only person in the world to have been on the cover of both Forbes and Shape magazine in the same month. She didn’t climb one mountain and then climb another. She climbed two mountains at the same time. And I was here to find out how she did it.
I greeted her and sat on an L-shaped couch in her office. During my research, I’d noticed that whenever Alba spoke about her mom, she always had the most uplifting things to say. And a few weeks earlier, while at Larry King’s breakfast table, Cal had told me one of his favorite questions is “What’s the best lesson your dad ever taught you?” I thought if I combined these two elements, we’d immediately go to a positive and profound place.
I asked Alba what the best lesson was that she learned from her mom. She took a moment to think, running her fingers over the fringes of her ripped jeans. I sat back, feeling I’d hit the bull’s-eye.
“I learned,” Alba said, “to try to make the most of moments. You know, my mom’s mother passed away when my mom was in her early twenties…”
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
“When I was a mean teenager,” Alba continued, “my mom would say, ‘You need to be nicer to me, because I am not going to be around forever.’ ”
She paused, almost as though she was looking inside herself. “You just never think life’s going to stop,” she said, “until it stops.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to redirect the conversation.
I’d seen YouTube clips where Alba glowed as she told the story of how she started her company. It went like this: she was twenty-six, pregnant with her first child, and after the baby shower she was washing a onesie in the laundry and was shocked by the allergens in the “child safe” detergent. That inspired her to create a company committed to safe and toxin-free products. In every video clip, Alba’s eyes lit up as she talked about helping create happier, healthier lives, which made this the perfect topic.
“How did you start The Honest Company?” I asked.
“I was thinking about mortality,” she said, “my own mortality.”
“At twenty-six?”
“When you bring life into the world,” she said, leaning forward, “it forces you to see how life and death are so close to each other. You realize: this person wasn’t here, and now they are. And now they can just as easily die. And it’s not just a baby that should have access to healthy products; it needs to be everybody. It needs to be me. I don’t want to die early. I don’t want to get Alzheimer’s. I’m terrified of that. My mom’s father had it. And then my mom had cancer. My aunt had cancer. My grandmother had cancer. My great-aunt had cancer. My cousin’s son had cancer. So…I just don’t want to die.”
I couldn’t speak. But that didn’t matter, because Alba just kept talking about death and cancer, death and cancer, death and cancer—until I became physically nauseous.
“My dad just got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer,” I blurted.
The first time I had ever said those words, I couldn’t get them out without tearing. As weeks passed, I could say the words, but I didn’t believe it. Now I just felt numb. Through all my stages, the reactions I got were the same. Most people put their arms around me, saying everything was going to be okay; others gave me that kind, soft-spoken “I’m so sorry”—which left me totally unprepared for Alba’s response. She slapped her hand down on the couch and said, “Oh, shit. Fuck.”
Her words felt like a bucket of ice water being splashed in my face. And the strangest thing about it was that it lifted a weight off my shoulders I didn’t even know was there.
From this point on, this no longer felt like an interview.
We spent the next thirty minutes talking about cancer in our families. She told me about dealing with her mom rushing to the emergency room, throwing up for three days, and then doctors cutting out pieces of her intestines. Alba put her parents on special diets, got them off harmful medications, set them up with a nutritionist, and they both lost fifty pounds. I told her I had set my dad up with a nutritionist who specialized in helping cancer patients, but my dad wouldn’t follow her advice or even see her a second time.
“It’s the craziest thing,” I said.
“For my parents,” Alba replied, “I just had to say, ‘Look. If you guys want to be around to see your grandchildren graduate high school or get married, you need to figure it out. It’s not okay anymore. You have to do whatever it takes.’ So, they did.”
Somehow her words made me feel less alone.
“It’s just horrible to be sick,” she added, letting out a breath. “And then, as I hear about more women having endometriosis and hysterectomies and hormonal cancers, breast cancer, cervical cancer, and all this—I’m in this rut, you know? I’m just like: What the hell is happening? Obviously the culprit is a combination of things, but I finally asked myself, ‘What’s within my control?’ And what’s within my control is what’s in and around my home.”
“The first time I bought something from your website,” I said, “was after my dad’s diagnosis. I know this sounds weird, but the cancer makes his bowel movements smell really bad, and I didn’t want to get him a regular air freshener, because I don’t know what chemicals are in it. And you guys are one of the only companies with a nontoxic air freshener, the essential oil one. And I told my dad, ‘This is your best friend. Use this every day.’ And it helped.”
Alba’s eyes gleamed as if I’d just handed her a gift.
“You and I know that what we put in our bodies, what we’re inhaling, what’s in our environment—it affects our health,” she said. “Our parents’ generation is like: ‘If I can get it at a store, it’s fine. If they’re selling it to me, it’s okay.’ And we’re like: ‘No, that shit ain’t right.’ It’s so hard because our parents are so afraid to try something new.”
“That’s the story of my life,” I said.
“My grandmother recently found out she has diabetes,” Alba went on. “I’m sure she’s had it for a while, but she would never go to the doctor. She’s had strokes and all that, and they could have been diabetes-related strokes, but she won’t acknowledge it. So last night we were at dinner and my grandpa was giving her all this cake and ice cream. I was like, ‘She could literally have a seizure right now and go into a coma! What are you guys doing?’ They just don’t want to accept reality.”
“It scares the shit out of me,” I said. “I have no idea how you dealt with it with so many family members. I’m drowning with just one.”
“I think it’s different when it’s your dad,” she replied.
“I feel like as technology gets better and we can save more lives,” I said, “the things that are killing us are getting more extreme; the toxins, the pollution.”
“I think that’s why we struck a chord,” Alba replied, “because people are seeing it.”
“The crazy part is—I know you talk a lot about your company helping babies—but you’re also doing this for my dad. You’re doing it for literally the thing that’s hurting me the most.”
Her eyes widened, and then an epiphany hit me. “This is crazy!” I said, lifting off the couch. “All of this”�
��I pointed to the view out of her glass door where some of her five hundred employees worked—“all of this is because you grabbed death by the collar, sat it down at the table, and asked yourself, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ ”
Now she looked like she’d gotten splashed with ice water.
“It’s true!” she said.
“You could have just continued a very successful acting career and been content with that, but instead you—”
“Exactly!” she said.
“It’s mind-blowing— Wow— If—” My energy was so high I could barely get a sentence out. “If we had this conversation two months ago, we wouldn’t have been talking about any of this. I’d never had to think about death before. But now I see your company in an entirely new way.”
Many celebrities create businesses that are a reflection of their lives on the mountaintop. They create fragrances or clothing lines, but Alba created a business that’s a reflection of her lowest point. She tapped into her humanity. She created something that resonates with all people. That was her key to ascending her second mountaintop: to first go back down to her deepest valley.
“Facing death,” Alba said, “makes you sensitive to how delicate life is. Everything is so”—she snapped her fingers —“in a moment. It forces you to think about all of your decisions in a different way. What really matters? What are you spending your life doing? What are you going to do when you stare your biggest fear in the eyes?”
* * *
I barely noticed our hour was up, but it didn’t matter, because we just kept talking. I took out my phone and pulled up the meme Talia had shown me, of the man racing the woman with all the extra obstacles in front of her.
“I want to see what you think of this,” I said.