Matt Logelin Interview

The family and I recently traveled down to Los Angeles to visit lullaby world headquarters, attend a wedding, and meet with some people. One of said people was Matt Logelin, the blogger who captured the world's attention (and dare I say heart) with his candid reflections on life with his daughter Madeline after the sudden death of his wife Liz. Matt and my wife have become e-bros over the last few months, and we sat down to talk while our kids romped in the grass, hit each other in the face, and got Thai food in their hair. The whole conversation would take hours to read in full, so here's some highlights.

Is there any music you won't play for Maddy? Patton Oswalt has this great routine about, if he ever has kids, he's going to hide all of his records and just play them the worst easy listening trash, so that when they rebel against his musical tastes they'll just listen to the indie rock that he really likes, and then when they're old enough they'll discover his secret stash and just be like "whoa." I remember my Mom's record player was just Bette Midler -- the Beaches soundtrack. My grandfather was listening to old country music, which I didn't appreciate at the time but we bonded over later --  he picked up all of the American Johnny Cash records. I'm hoping that Maddy will do the discovering thing. We went to Amoeba Records, it was the first time she was in her stroller, and this Rashaan Roland Kirk record was playing and she was just rocking back and forth, really enjoying it.

Have you taken Maddy to any concerts? Just one, accidentally -- I ran this 10K in downtown LA, over by USC, and Nike was sponsoring a party afterwards with Kanye West playing. I had no idea! Luckily, I have this huge blue headset for her that blocks out most of the volume. I was going to take her to a show a few weeks ago at Spaceland, too.

When do you think you're going to let Maddy read the blog? It depends on if I keep it up. If I keep it going, I see it being part of her daily life, but if I discontinue it I'll probably end up telling her some time in the future, so she can read it if she wants. I mean, when she's in school somebody'll be able to search her name and find all this crazy stuff. I'm sure her high school boyfriends will read it. I try not to reveal too much, try not to embarrass her. I've certainly thought about stopping it. If I'd known how big this would get, I never would have done it. And now I have these people writing me that want to know how to make their blog "famous." All of these social media people are following me on Twitter and I kind of find them annoying. People think that this is some easy guaranteed money. But it all just happened organically --  it wasn't like "gonna make a quick buck, go on Oprah, get a book deal." If that had been the case, you would have never heard of me. But on the other hand, in some way I'm helping people now --  which was not my intention either, but people try to get advice, ask questions --  "My friend's baby died, what should I do for them?" And my only advice is don't throw anything away in the house. As much as it freaks me out, it's kind of an obligation now, with the Foundation --  people donate because they're invested in the story, and to keep people interested sometimes I feel like I'm pimping my daughter out a little bit by telling my story. But people did help me get through this situation, and now we're going to do this for other people.

How did the Liz Logelin Foundation get started? When the blog started to get attention, I started being connected with all of these people who wanted to give things to me, but -- look around -- I have everything I need. I have more than Maddy needs. You don't want to hurt people's feelings by turning down a gift they're giving you, so I tried to find away to just pass it on to someone who needed help more than I did. When you think about it, in times past in a small community, when somebody died, people would bring them dinner and help them out. With the community of the Internet, people want to do something for each other, so they started sending me gift cards, things like that. I realized I could use this attention to do for other people what they'd done for me.

You just signed a book deal with Grand Central  -- can we talk about what the book will be like? It's a more conventional narrative --  it's a lot different from the blog. There were concerns all around with publishers worried that people would say "Why should I pay for this when I can read it online for free?" If I just printed my blog, the book would be as thick as a phone book.  I never had any intention of people reading this --  if I did, I would have used punctuation and proper grammar. The plan is to, depending on which way it goes, have the book deal with the first year after Liz died. It'll be mostly chronological, but every chapter there's flashbacks to Liz and I. Some of the significant events I wrote about on the blog but didn't get very in-depth. The blog is more of a daily account, "Today we ate Thai food and Maddy spit up." With the book I can be more evocative, more in-depth. A perfect example is a story I sort of touched on in the blog when I went on a trip to Bamff with Liz's family. It was a really dark night for me, I was with Liz's parents and they didn't really know how to deal with me, we kept dancing around things, I wanted to talk about it and they didn't, so we were sort of figuring out how to mourn together. Every time I'd try to go off and be alone they'd come up with some excuse to come with me. So I hatched a plan to just get out of the car at a red light and walk away when we got back to the city. The car stopped, I said "Hey, I'm getting out of the car by myself and I'll be back later," and I walked to a bar and got piss drunk, one of the few times that I've done that. People have questions all the time, and I try to answer them in the comments section, but here I can go in-depth about Liz and bring her out, too. And on a selfish level I want Madeline to know her mother through this. Ultimately she'll be proud of it, I hope.