A Conversation with Lea Thau
Originally published in Oak: The Nordic Journal

“Everyday, I’m in a battle for my soul. But today, today feels like the beginning of a new life.”

It’s the first week of 2018 and Lea Thau is perched on an emotional precipice, ready to take a personal and creative leap that has been a long time coming. “I feel like I’m finally unlocking something that I’ve been trying to unlock my whole life: I’ve always wanted to be more of a storyteller than an intellectual, more of an artist than an entrepreneur. And now, I finally feel like it’s okay to say my work is art and that my art is autobiographical - that I have something personal to give to the world.” It’s been a long journey for Thau to get to this place; not just the place where she feels she can finally call herself an artist, but also to this precise place in space and time.

Today, the Danish-born Thau lives in Los Angeles with her son. Lea is the Peabody award-winning host and producer of the highly successful podcast Strangers, a show she created in 2011 and which averages more than 500,000 downloads per episode. Before coming to LA, Thau served as the executive and creative director of the live storytelling organization The Moth in New York City, where she helped create The Moth Podcast and The Moth Radio Hour. Before that she was a graduate student at Columbia University. Before that she lived in Paris. And way back at the very beginning, Lea Thau was just a kid growing up in Aarhus, with dreams of someday coming to America.

Now a dual citizen of Denmark and the United States, Lea is quick to highlight what she loves about both her home countries, “Clearly, Denmark is the superior society and I admit that I still feel very much like a Dane, but, for some reason, I have always felt more alive here in the US. It was like I was destined to make my way to New York eventually, and when I did, I fell in love with the city, the diversity, the passion to succeed, all of it.” For Thau, it was that initial leap across the Atlantic that helped to first awaken the artist she was later to become. “No matter where it is you go,” Thau says, “when you’re an outsider, you get the chance to reinvent yourself - and in a lot of ways, you have to. Obviously, everyone is from somewhere. But, here in the US, where you’re from is not what defines you, what defines you is what you want to be. I’ve always loved that about America.” But, despite a decade and a half of successes, her New York dream came to an abrupt end in April 2010. “My life was falling apart,” Lea says, “I was eight months pregnant, my relationship with The Moth was coming to an end, I was out of work, my career was in the toilet, and then I found out that my fiance was having an affair. I had a life where nothing had gone wrong until everything had gone wrong.”

So, when she was offered an opportunity to move to the West Coast, Thau jumped at the chance to start over and reinvent once again, “The best things I’ve ever done in life are the times when I have thrown myself fearlessly into the unknown, without my feet on the ground, without having too much in my head. And honestly, when I started Strangers, that’s when I first started to discover my own creative voice. When I was with The Moth, I didn’t see myself as an artist. I wasn’t an artist, I was a midwife for artists. I knew how to help other people tell stories, but with Strangers, I had to figure out how to tell my own.”

Despite its growing popularity, Strangers is not an easy show to describe. Criss-crossing multiple genres and patchworking various storytelling formats, the show is something of a wunderkammer for the ears; the show’s personal stories are at times funny or shocking or sad or, as is often the case, heartbreakingly raw and honest. Sometimes Lea narrates the show, sometimes she doesn’t. “I worry sometimes that the show is too many different things,” Thau confesses, “then again, it feels really fresh to make a show like this because it’s always changing and morphing. Each episode provides something different.”

But when asked about what is at the heart of Strangers - what it is that ties the various story threads together - Thau is definitive, “I believe the red thread that connects everything is radical intimacy and radical empathy. These are not just pretty stories that we want to tell about our lives, they’re confessional: the mistakes we’ve made, the consequences that followed, and, in the end, how we can admit these things and still be worthy of love. I think Strangers (and storytelling in general) is really an exploration of how knowable we are: to ourselves and to each other. It’s a search for genuine connections and an existential exploration of what it’s like to be human.”

As Thau continues to grow into her ever-expanding role as writer, director, and producer of Strangers, she is becoming more and more comfortable adding her own life’s story to this shared quest to know and be known. “I’ve experienced a relative amount of success so far, but, to be honest, I haven’t always enjoyed the journey enough. Right now, I’m trying to make a shift, trying to free myself of the ‘push push push’ mentality that defined me in New York. I want to reset and find more joy and satisfaction in the process. It’s not a shift you make in a day, it takes time and effort. And I’m considering bringing listeners into this reset process. It’s scary, but I’m considering it. My hope is that maybe this very personal process could be instructive to others.”

When asked about the arc of her creative journey and the winding path that has brought her to this new place in life, Lea replies with the raw, radical honesty her listeners have come to expect, “You know, I’ve always felt a bit like a stranger to myself and so my whole life - the searching, the struggle, the need to prove myself -  I think it has has all been a process of becoming free.”

To learn more about Lea Thau and the Strangers podcast, visit the show page.