In the latest episode of the Queer Love Podcast, Charley Soderbergh and Jeanée Ledoux join host Jerry Portwood to discuss their collaboration on the essay they co-wrote, “Love Is a Warm Curling Iron.”
As Charley explains, he originally wrote a screenplay about his childhood years growing up with his family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, during the Covid pandemic since he had free time since he couldn’t work at his salon at the time. When he shared it with his friend Jeanée—who he’d met when they both lived in Atlanta (but who had also grown up in southern Louisiana in nearby Opelousas)—she was intrigued by the character of his quirky mom Midge and eventually they began working on adapting it into a memoir.
“There were so many synchronicities around this project,” Jeanée explains. “Out of the blue, I get this screenplay from Charley. I had never heard him express an interest in writing a movie—his frickin’ brother is one of the biggest directors in the world—but I’d never heard this man say he wanted to write a movie! The crazy thing is, I was taking my first screenwriting workshops. So he wanted to know what I thought about it, and I gave him some pretty deep feedback and a lot of encouragement, but I wasn’t thinking, ‘This is something for me.’ I just thought, ‘Good for him. He’s trying something’ And I’d been kinda doing a similar thing…”
Although at that time, neither of them was thinking of writing a book together, they eventually began to work on it approximately four years ago. Since Charley is also an artist, they wondered if they could do some version of a book that combined his artwork with the stories and illustrate some of the scenes. Jeanée had read Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, and she suggested Charley check it out for inspiration.
People are often curious about the editing process, so Jerry asks the duo what it was like when he sent it back with suggestions that Charley do more investigation on how his parents’ relationship may have influenced his internal blueprint that was then applied to his friendships and romantic relationships with men over the years.
“What the essay was missing was Charley’s relationship with Midge and how that affected his grown-up friendships and romantic relationships,” Jeanée says. She explains that she provided prompts in the text and asked him to “vomit” words and give “maximum detail,” which she could then shape and have his voice present in the final piece.
“I joke that I came into this world as a raging empath,” Charley explains. “It’s taken me a long time to realize that, and I think it’s just another part of me that I didn’t know I had to be sensitive to. My impulse is to help, to be a problem-solver, and to be loved and appreciated, of course. Since I had a fractured family, that constantly needed patchwork, so I just took that into my regular life. … It was just second nature; I didn’t even know I was doing it.”
When asked how the collaboration functioned, since it was Charley’s lived experience filtered through Jeanée’s perspective—and included a lot of research—they both expressed an ease to the process.
“I feel like our work together is very much like our conversations,” Charley explained. “Jeanée’s very thoughtful about the questions that she asks, so even if she was trying to tease something out of me, it never felt like she was ‘mining for information.’ … But she’s also a great audience … with big explosions of laughter when I’d tell her a really nutty story.”
Listen in as they tell more stories of how this essay came to be, including the time they employed some implements from a witchcraft shop they visited in Pittsburgh to summon Charley’s mom Midge to ask for her blessing on the project.
Then, if you haven’t already, make sure you read and listen along as Charley narrates “Love Is a Warm Curling Iron.”
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