‘We Aren’t Stuck Here’: Midwestern culture, basements, and disasters

A conversation with Taylor K. Phillips about how to have a Midwestern conversation

I was sitting in my home on a Sunday in the fall of 2021 when I got a call from the mother of a friend of mine. Sue wanted me to come to the local bookstore immediately — there was a writer in town who was working on a book about the Midwest. Sue thought I should meet her.

I don’t remember why I didn’t go to the bookstore. But I did end up meeting the author. It was Taylor K. Phillips, whose hilarious writing about Midwestern conventions and politeness has given me a lot of joy.

Here is a bit from her viral McSweeny’s piece “A Guide to Midwestern Conversation.”

“Oh my gosh, I didn’t see you there!”

Ugh. I really thought I’d gotten out of your sightline. You are painfully boring and never shut up. Talking to you makes me want to gouge my eyes out with the keys to my Camry. Please sit down and split my bran muffin.

“Those kids have a lot of energy”

MONSTERS THEY ARE MONSTERS. I have never once requested compensation for babysitting them.

“We’ve spoken a few times.”

He is either completely boring or an abhorrent excuse for a human being, but I have nothing further to say about him besides the fact that once or twice I was forced to acknowledge his existence in the form of stilted conversation. The next time I see him I will graciously hug him.

Of course, we met in the most Midwestern of ways — specifically a mom named Sue insisting that we do so. Taylor is from Kansas City, Missouri, and her humor and insight crystallize so much about what I love about the Midwest. The passive-aggressive avoidance of conflict. The aggressive-aggressive kindness. 

Humor, more than anything else, allows us a lens to see ourselves, mock ourselves, and in doing so, define ourselves. Taylor’s book, which builds on the McSweeney’s essay from which it takes its name, will be published on April 11. And it’s a beautiful celebration and send-up of Middle America.

I talked with Taylor about basements, Midwestern culture, and apologizing to trees after they fall on our houses. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Lyz: A lot of what it means to be Midwestern comes from a reliance on the land and a way of being connected to the land and weather in ways that are very different from life in a coastal city.

Taylor: And something I think that I didn't think about until I lived on the coast was the variety of weather in the Midwest – you can have a heat wave, you can have a tornado, but you can also have an ice storm. And technically it hasn't happened in a while, but one of the biggest earthquake fault lines runs right through Missouri.

Lyz: A lot of the perception of flyover country is cultivated because people here don’t want to be perceived. They resist perception and then get mad when you don’t perceive them. It’s typical passive-aggressive mother behavior. I remember seeing this after the 2008 flood and again with the 2020 derecho, where so many Midwesterners were like, “Oh, we’re fine, it’s the other people who need help.” And I was thinking, “Brenda, you have no roof or running water. You need help.” This is the whole stereotype of the Midwest, When people do need help, they just won't ask for it.

Taylor: There's something about it feeling like you're being too much to complain. There's this Midwestern, "No, I'm doing great. And it's my responsibility to look on the bright side of this. It's not so bad without the wind. It's not so bad without the humidity. If the central element of this weren't here, it would be totally fine.”

Lyz: Where do you think that comes from? That's a very particular stoicism. I encounter it often when I ask people about how they fared with our last natural disaster. And they'll say, "Oh, we were so lucky. We only lost half the roof. Four trees fell in our yard, which insurance won't cover. So, it's thousands of dollars out of pocket. But we really consider ourselves lucky.”

Taylor: I think that there's a Midwestern acceptance of reality. If you go to a restaurant and the waiter says, "Oh, we're out of this today." "Oh, bummer." Like, move on. The whole sentiment is, we're happy and we're healthy and we're here. And I think that there is an element of respect for the land where when stuff like that happens, it’s like, "Well, we're living on this earth, and it doesn't belong exclusively to us. And that the tree fell because the wind was blowing and the tree needed to go down somewhere. And my house was in the way, my bad."

Lyz: "Ope, sorry about that."

Taylor: "I'm so sorry. Next time if you could just fall a little to the left. No worries. No worries about that. Don't worry about it. It's just a little mess. We'll get it cleaned up right away. You gave me an excuse to try out this new vacuum."

Lyz: "Gary can use his new chainsaw."

Taylor: "Yeah, no, it'll be fun. You know what? It'll be fun. This is actually great. That's excellent. I'm excited. I'm excited this happened. I’m happy you fell on our house, tree.”

Lyz: There's nothing that I think causes a bigger ruckus than asking Midwesterners to define the Midwest. I'm going to ask you to do that because in your book you have a very specific map. But talk to me about why this is so controversial.

Taylor: I think “Midwestern” feels, much like our accents and many things about us, neutral in a way that people want to claim for themselves and they identify with it. And I also think that the definition isn't perfect. My dad is from the bootheel of Missouri, and that's a Midwestern south-leaning South if I've ever experienced one — also a split state on the Mason-Dixon line if we're doing it that way.

But I’ve also recently had discussions with people from Western Pennsylvania that end with, “Yeah, no.” That feels like the Midwest.

When you're writing a book, you're defining the audience for the book. And anyone that I would talk to about it, even if they weren't from the Midwest, their immediate reaction was to cling to their Midwestern identity or identify someone close to them that was Midwestern. To say, "I'm not from the Midwest, but my dad just married a woman from Ohio. So I totally hear what you're saying." They wanted to understand, and I found that so sweet and wonderful. People want to identify as Midwestern.

Lyz: You're right, people really want to identify as Midwestern. (It occurs to me that it's similar to the way people identify as middle class even if they're really rich or poor.) There's something essential about the Midwest that people really want to associate with. What do you think that is?

Taylor: Well, I was actually having a conversation with my agent about this at the very beginning when we were talking about how we wanted to structure it and how much we wanted to define in the book what a Midwesterner was. We were really intentional.

The Midwestern characters and the conversations as they're happening in this book are very suburban, cul-de-sac, garages with fridges. And I do think it is exactly what you were saying about people wanting to identify as middle class. I think something that's fun about that and fun about the Midwest and wonderful, and a double-edged sword in its own way, is that the house-yard-garage-neighborhood experience is not exclusive to a single demographic anymore.

Lyz: When I read that essay in New York magazine about the Fleishman moms, I was like, "Don't they know they can move to Minneapolis?" It doesn't have to be this hard, even Chicago.

Taylor: So wild to me because I have always known that I wanted to be in New York because I have always known that I wanted to be an entertainer, to be in this fast-paced world. But I am not here waking up every morning thinking, "Thank God I'm not in Kansas City." I'll go home and I'll go to a barbecue outside in someone's yard and you feel what you're missing. And what I’m missing isn’t what I want. But there are some people who are like, "Yeah, I would like the pace of New York. But you know what I really want is my own house and my own yard, and to decorate it for people to come over every Friday and have a book club.” But so often people who aren’t from the Midwest think that staying here isn’t a choice. They think people in the Midwest feel stuck. And it's like, "Actually, we are happy. And you feel stuck in New York sometimes."

Lyz: I want to start a fight. I want to say that I think that Kansas should technically not be in the Midwest.

Taylor: Ooh, tell me, do you think it should be in the Plains?

Lyz: I think so. It doesn't feel like its regional identity really doesn’t fit with the rest of the Midwest; do you know what I mean? It feels like it's got its own specific thing going on.

Taylor: My thing about Kansas, and especially over the past year, is I feel like the way that the country has treated Kansas, and the way that Kansas has responded, has felt like the epitome of the Midwest relationship with the rest of the country.

Lyz: You mean a chip on your shoulder?

Taylor: Well, chip on your shoulder. And if I had to listen to one more freaking coastal journalist say, “Wow, it seems like ruby-red Kansas is really not everything we thought it was. They're kind of their own state. They're kind of unique," I was going to put my head through a wall.

If you'd been paying attention to Kansas politically for any amount of time beyond the fact that they had a constitutional amendment abortion vote coming up, you would know that they are constantly in dialogue with themselves in a way that you should not just write off.

Lyz: So talk to me about the rules of being Midwestern. What are the rules?

Taylor: The idea that when you arrive at someone's house, you immediately ask, because we are a diverse tradition of people, "What do I do with my shoes? Do I keep them on my feet? Do I take them off? In which room do I take them off?" And everyone has strong opinions about which is better.

Lyz: I think it's so funny. Sometimes you watch these conversations on social media and everybody's like, "We wear shoes inside.” And other people say, “People who wear shoes inside are animals.” And I'm like, "Whatever works in your home, that is what I will do.”

Taylor: Exactly. Exactly. Unless you tell me that your house rules say that I must show up empty-handed, in which case you are incorrect. Gifting is my religion, unfortunately.

Lyz: There is this sense that the Midwest is this kind of vast, beige, vinyl-sided middle area of America that doesn't have a culture. But I know you think that that is wrong. So talk to me about it.

Taylor:  I think part of the reason why maybe sometimes people see Middle America as absence is that there is a type of mentality and a type of hospitality and a type of individualism and community that is actually shared by a lot of other cultures, where you would never show up to someone's house empty-handed. When somebody arrives at your home, you serve them. And I think Midwestern culture is about asking questions and being curious. So people can misinterpret graciousness as absence. 

And I think what’s most frustrating to me about the way that the Midwest is treated sometimes by people who don't know it and who don't appear to be interested in it, but want to have opinions about it, is they don't ask any questions. Midwesterners ask a lot of questions.

Lyz: I grew up moving around a lot, so I often find it stressful to be in a place where people know my business. But being cared about and known this intimately by your neighbors is a little claustrophobic sometimes. And it’s not just me — people care about everyone in a way that you can’t when you live on a block with 1 million people.

When my friend from Minnesota moved to New York, she was like, "I can't hold the door open for everybody because there are too many people.”

Taylor: Exactly. And when I first moved to Boston for school, I would go on a run. And in Missouri, if you run by another human being, you make eye contact and you wave. If you're getting your newspaper and you're going back in your house and you see a runner a couple of yards away, you stand in your door and you wave. And people in Boston looked at me like I was bananas, making eye contact, running, and nodding. Sometimes other women would look after me a little bit to make sure that I wasn't signaling that I needed help.

Lyz: I think about it in terms of crying. I can cry in my car here in the Midwest. I asked somebody one time, "Where do you cry in New York?" She's like, "Wherever, it doesn't matter." I was like, "Well, I don't want to cry on the street in the Midwest. Somebody's going to post on Facebook that they saw me crying and then I'll have five baskets of gifts at my door." And they're like, "In New York nobody cares. There are too many people."

Taylor: There are too many people.

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