From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

It's The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

My guest has written a fair number of what I would call psychological detective stories about the self in popular culture and about people who are really pursuing an ideal and profoundly lacking self-awareness.

We're going to talk about one of these people in particular, giving this, sort of, the 60th anniversary of Spider-Man.

The first issue is a cover date at 1963, but that's another long, weird story.

My guess is Abraham Josephine Reesman, her book, The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, which is more specifically titled, True Belie.

We're going to be talking about that.

And Josie, thanks so much for doing this.

Oh, I'm so happy to be here.

This is very exciting.

You do have this interesting pivot towards people who think of themselves as being one thing,

but are really something else entirely different.

I can't really see the difference between those two poles.

So far, at least, you know, who knows what the future holds. But the books that I've written and the

book that I'm writing are all about men, and they are men, who created myths around themselves

and then occupied those myths to a point where it became difficult for them and everyone around them

to distinguish between myth and reality.

And to be honest, part of the point of why I write these books is I really think we as a species,

as a society, as a whatever, put too much weight on the idea that there is an easy distinction

between fact and fiction. We spend a lot of time going, oh, well, we know what's right and wrong,

or we know what's true or false. And in reality, those values are often very obscured from us.

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