No sugarcoating in CBC’s Love Me
CBC podcast Love Me reveals intimate truths about relationships, many messy but all moving
What we all want more than anything is to be loved. We want to know that in our time here, we make a difference — and love, I believe, is a kind of marker for that difference.
In his poem Late Fragment, the extraordinary American shortstory writer and poet Raymond Carver (1938-1988) distilled it: “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so? / I did. / And what did you want? / To call myself beloved, to / feel myself / Beloved on the earth.”
It’s human nature, of course, to think that others are getting love right — that they’re better at it than we are. Yet we all blunder and bumble around; we are all misunderstood.
In Love Me, a thoroughly excellent new CBC podcast, Montrealbased producers Mira BurtWintonick and Cristal Duhaime explore, with great subtlety and sensitivity, what they call “the messiness of human connection.”
As someone who loves talking to people about their personal lives, “I wanted an excuse to ask people private questions,” BurtWintonick said.
From the outside, she said, relationships appear so different from what they actually are. “People sugar-coat things. They are less than forthcoming.”
We all have messy relationships, whether with siblings or parents or partners or others, “and I wanted to poke at those issues a bit,” she said. “When you talk to people about their struggles connecting, you realize it is not you alone.”
You realize that “no one does it quite right.”
A few stories in Love Me are fictional accounts written by Burt-Wintonick and Duhaime — the two worked together on the long-running CBC series WireTap — and one is adapted from a short story by Pasha Malla. But the rest are true stories, told by people who reached out to them through their networks and contacts, and each, in its way, is remarkable. “We were surprised at how much people wanted to talk,” said Burt-Wintonick.
They chose the submissions they liked best and had “casual, intimate” conversations with subjects in which they garnered as many details as they could. “We’d record them for about an hour and then shape and edit the story until it was about six to 10 minutes and had the most compelling story arc and emotional engagement,” she said.
The result is a series of beautifully crafted, deeply human stories, told simply: the reminiscing of a 60-something woman wondering, a lifetime later, if she had missed her one chance at happiness; the nurse whose world was turned upside down when she realized the critically injured young man in her emergency room was her fiancé; the woman who confessed that her best friend was someone she’d never actually seen.
A son trying to figure out how to mourn his father, a millionaire and, later, a convicted felon who had committed suicide; the young woman recalling with great fondness her imaginative young babysitting charge — and, with equally profound sadness, the reason she gave up the job; a man who feels guilty about keeping a family secret and yet keeps it. “I don’t want to lose my dad; maybe that is selfish. But I don’t want him to lose his son.”
The widow who, in becoming involved with a man who was all wrong for her, was able at last to confront her grief over her husband’s death. Her account was so poignant, so honest, that I almost stood up and cheered. Listening (repeatedly) to the episodes, I was struck by the intimacy of the medium.
Not every story is dark. The account of a new bride who becomes part of an unusual love triangle will make you smile — and there’s a laugh-out-loud funny story about a family dog who preferred one brother to the other.
The producers, both comfortable behind the scenes, chose Lu Olkowski, an American producer, to host. “We found her voice warm and kind of compelling,” said Burt-Wintonick.
In addition to the creative direction and the editing, the two producers did the sound design and mixing. An original theme song by Tim Kingsbury (Arcade Fire, Sam Patch) begins every episode; each features music composed by Murray Lightburn (the Dears) along with music sourced from places like the Free Music Archive.
A few of the stories in Love Me have aired on CBC and on American shows; the podcast, available on iTunes as well as the CBC website, has been doing well on the iTunes chart. “People seem to like the intimacy ... and vulnerability of it,” said Burt-Wintonick. People have told them how some stories moved them to tears — “and we love it. It makes us smile to make people cry — not that we are sadists.” They’d love to do a second season.
In a bonus episode in which producers and host discussed the origins of the podcast’s name, Burt-Wintonick recounted an experience a few years ago while shopping for a bathmat at the Bay: a sales associate was trying to get her attention, but “it was one of those days where I didn’t want to talk to anyone” and so she ignored him. And then he lay down on the floor in the towel section, right in front of her — and she stepped right over him.
“It’s almost like he was trying to be the bathmat I was looking for, somehow,” she recalled. “In doing this bizarre display in front of me, he was saying, ‘Hey, look at me. I am here. I am worthy of your attention.’”
To her, the guy was “this perfect illustration of that weird little voice we all have inside of us, crying out to be loved.”
Duhaime said she pictured him as “an ex-member of the cast of Cats or something. His desire to be seen and loved I guess expressed itself in a pretty strange way but, when you think about it, we all express our need for love in pretty strange and unique ways. It can make us do some pretty ridiculous things and it can also take us to some pretty dark places. And the show is about that. It’s about how things get messy between us when we try to stifle that little voice ... or when that voice feels like it is not being heard.”