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Spend an awkward evening Friday with David Nadelberg, the creator of cringe-cute phenomenon Mortified. Nadelberg is in the business of encouraging adults to share youthful artifacts that are, well, mortifying: diary entries, poems, home movies—the more embarrassing, the better. The Mortified empire includes stage shows, podcasting, radio and TV programming, and books. Friday evening, he brings the whole shebang to the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
What do you think accounts for the staying power of a project that gets adults to embarrass themselves in public?
It’s our quinceanera this year, and we feel just as much like an awkward teenager as the people we depict. The only reason we’ve had any kind of traction with this idea for 15 years in multiple countries and cultures [is] we live in a world where everybody feels very disconnected and niche. People are starved for ways to feel a little more communal. I think America kind of lost that in some ways. Anything that can instill a sense of community or camaraderie can resonate. What Mortified taps into is satisfying that hunger for honesty and self-deprecation. I find it very liberating to listen to these diaries and poems and love letters—not as a producer but as an audience member, like I have permission to be imperfect.
One of the things for me over the years is I get to hear the diary of the weird girl with braces and the punk rock kid and the popular jock kid. They really are all the same underneath. Everyone was 15 once. You might have been athletic or a lazy slob. No matter what you were, when you were 15 you were faced with the adult world for the first time, and all that it offered—love, working, all the adult anxieties start to kick in. The melodrama, the anxieties, the fears.
Tell us about the new project we’ll be getting a look at.
It’s a sequel to Mortified Nation, which is a movie we made in 2013. We’re making a six-episode series and we’re literally finishing it this week, which is why I don’t know what I’m going to show yet. This couldn’t be any more hot off the presses—never before seen in public. Each one is about 45 minutes long, airing on a network to be announced later. Each one has a theme. One episode is about love, one is about family, one is about growing up gay. It’s been really fun, actually. We went all over the country and show stuff in Baltimore and Austin and San Francisco.
The evening at CAM features some already-selected St. Louisans, as well as an open mic, and you do stage shows across the world. What makes for a great submission?
We don’t care about somebody’s talents as a performer. If anything, we want their lack of talent as a writer. All that matters is, is the stuff you wrote as a kid lame enough for our needs. We don’t care about your stage presence, we don’t care whether your childhood artifacts form a story. All we care about is finding enough minutes that are going to make us laugh. We help people pick excerpts, figure out their best framing and the best bit of biographical context to introduce a piece. There’s a liberating kick to it.
During the day Friday, you’re running a workshop for would-be participants. How do you shepherd someone’s experience of telling their own mortifying story?
I like teaching, and as complicated as story is, I think story is also forehead-smackingly simple. I like stripping down the elements of something. We show people Mortified’s approach to storytelling. Whether they’re a journalist or a novelist or a medical researcher or an attorney, you need to know how to tell a story. I like demystifying the world of narrative and specifically personal narrative. The concept behind our workshop is to demystify, to illuminate what story is and how it can work and how it can be a benefit to you no matter what you do for a living. I really love when non-writers step into the workshop.
What’s up with the new book, My Mortified Life: A Guided Journal to Gauge How Much You’ve Changed Since Childhood?
Even though it’s our third book, it’s our first diary, which is awesome. We ask a series of questions for readers to answer to sort of compare their lives as adults with their lives as kids. It’s like, do you fight the same way? Do you obsess over someone the same way? Do you eat the same way? Do you take care of your body the same way? Family, work ethic, love life. Are you still the same weirdo you were when you were 14? The reason I’m so excited about this book is I don’t think this has ever been done before. There’s a market for guided journals but our book has none of that nonsense.
An Awkward Evening with Mortified Creator David Nadelberg happens Friday, July 14 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20, or $50 VIP with reserved seating, drinks and a meet-and-greet. Workshop Friday at noon, $15, $10 for CAM members. For more info, go to camstl.org.
