This spring the formidable Deborah A. Lott—author, editor and college instructor—will be visiting the Unlocking Your Story workshop. She'll be offering us an inside view of the creative process behind writing her memoir Don't Go Crazy Without Me, which just hit the shelves on April 7th! It's a coming of age story of a girl who grows up under the magnetic spell of her outrageously eccentric father.
In our interview below, Deborah shares about what she believes to be essential when writing memoir, and imparts some of what she teaches her writing students at Antioch University.
Deborah A. Lott is a writer, editor, and college instructor. Her creative nonfiction has been published widely. Her work has been thrice named as Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays, and thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. As an independent editor, Lott has worked with a number of published authors developing articles, web content, books, academic monographs, and other material.
Her memoir Don’t Go Crazy Without Me (Red Hen Press, April 2020) is a coming of age story of a girl who grows up under the magnetic spell of her outrageously eccentric father. Alienated from her emotionally distant mother, she bonded closely with her father and his worldview. When he plunged from neurotic to full-blown psychotic, she nearly followed him. Sanity is not always a choice, but for the sixteen-year-old, decisions had to be made – a line drawn between reality and what her mother called her “overactive imagination.” She would have to give up an identity and beliefs forged in love.
KARIN GUTMAN: Can you tell us about your book and what it’s about?
DEBORAH A. LOTT: The book is a coming of age story. It starts when I'm about four and goes right through adolescence. It ends when I'm 17. And it's basically about growing up in a very eccentric family with a kind of nutty father who then becomes psychotic and feeling very closely bound to him in his worldview and then trying to separate. How do you separate?
KARIN: I imagine it’s a seminal story that very much shaped you. Is it something that you've wanted to tell for some time?
DEBORAH: I've been telling a version of it and pieces of it for a very long time, probably ever since I went back and got my MFA and started writing more creatively. I was a medical writer for years and then I started writing more creatively in a more public way. I always kept journals and did my own writing. But I never put it all together in one narrative.
KARIN: When you say ‘versions’, do you mean published essays?
DEBORAH: Yeah, I published quite a number of essays in literary journals that feature some of the episodes and also a number of episodes from my childhood and adolescence that aren't in the book.
KARIN: At what point did you realize it was a book? Was there a point when you knew that you needed to shift your focus and develop it into a full-length narrative?
DEBORAH: Well, I think I wanted it to be a book. Initially the first step… I took some of the episodes and just put them side by side, and then started to work on shaping a narrative. I had a big whiteboard and I wrote a timeline and also the big themes—that were a throughline through the book. And then I decided at a certain point, several years into the process to add some present-day interludes. I didn't want it to be just a straight coming of age; I wanted to show how my childhood and adolescence resonate in my adult life. There are now these present-day interludes interspersed with the coming of age story.
KARIN: How are those interludes woven into the narrative?
DEBORAH: They're separate episodes. There's one continuous narrative that's pretty much linear in time, and then there are these interludes that just say Present, Bedroom, Midnight or Present, Kitchen, 9:00 AM or Present, UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute where I was working as a writer with a group of psychiatrists. So they're interspersed with the story. And they tend to pick up themes that are related to what's going on in the chapters with which they’re interspersed.
They don't talk about the episodes per se, but some of them advance your understanding of the narrator, I would say. And they're not linear themselves, so they don't have their own narrative line. I thought about that. Should they have their own linear line? They don't have a linear arc. They have an emotional arc. They illuminate what's going on in the main narrative.
KARIN: Did you work with anyone through the writing process?
DEBORAH: I worked with a writers’ group. I had a really strong, longstanding writers’ group, which included a number of other incredible women that I shared drafts with. And then at a certain point, I had a conversation with one of my mentors, Mark Doty, and he wanted an editor that he knows, David Groff, to take a look at it. David helped me to come up with more of a linear narrative. And then, of course, once the book sold, Kate Gale, the founder and editor-in-chief of Red Hen Press, helped me take it to another level. She asked really intriguing philosophical and spiritual sorts of questions of the text, and helped me to deepen it.
KARIN: Who is Mark Doty?
DEBORAH: Mark Doty is a poet and memoirist who wrote a memoir called Heaven's Coast that was about his partner dying of AIDS, a gorgeous memoir about grief. He wrote a book called Dog Years partly about his relationship with his dog, about the way human beings interact with dogs, but he's also a poet. He's a National Book Award-winning poet. He has been a mentor, and I had studied with him. I took a weeklong poetry writing course with him, which was really helpful too.
KARIN: Tell me about that.
DEBORAH: I think memoirists should study poetry too, because it helps you bring in that element of lyricism, of close attention to language, so that you're not just telling a story. You're also aware of trying to create a beautiful literary object.
KARIN: What does that mean… to create a beautiful, literary object?
DEBORAH: That you want the language to function as something that's stunning in its own right when people read it. Even though I was writing about pretty sad stuff, I wanted the language to be beautiful.
KARIN: And the poetry class helped?
DEBORAH: Oh yeah. I’m more of a lyrical writer than I am a reporter of fact. Reading and studying poetry helps to amp up the lyricism and fine tunes your ear. You learn to read everything aloud. I think it's important to read your work aloud and hear it. You want it to work on the level of metaphor and you want it to work on the level of the language itself being as glorious as you can make it.
KARIN: At the same time, don't you think there's a risk that a writer overlooks story by relying on pretty language?
DEBORAH: Right, right. You need the story too, of course.
KARIN: Would you agree that story comes first?
DEBORAH: By story, I think you mean an emotional arc, right?
KARIN: Yes.
DEBORAH: You need to know what happened, but also what you learned from it or how you felt about it. I think you need feeling and thinking and beautiful language. I don't think just events do it. Because you can go through some incredible events during your childhood and not be able to write about it in a way that makes anybody else care.
I think if you're really in touch with the emotions and you're in touch with the sensory experience while you're writing, the language will probably follow… if you're writing in a state where you're in touch with the body. I talk to my students a lot about embodied writing.
KARIN: Tell me about that.
DEBORAH: Well, it shouldn't just be coming from your head. It should be coming from a physical place. You should be able to feel it in your body when you're writing it and you should make sure that you include a lot of sensory detail, and the sensory details are also the way you access memory. Right? Memories come through smells and sounds. I know that when my students have trouble remembering an event, I tell them to try to re-create what were the smells, what were the sounds, what were the tastes that you associate with that period?
KARIN: What if you don’t remember a lot of the sensory details, but you remember the general mood and visuals in an impressionistic way?
For example, maybe I remember we were at the kitchen table, but I don't remember what anyone was wearing or any dialogue or sensory details. But I know this event was important.
DEBORAH: You don't need all those details, but if you just recreate at least the emotional texture of it... I think if you start to write about it, some of those details come back. I really do. Obviously it's partly a reconstruction. You're not going to remember exactly what your mother was wearing that day, but you remember what your mother always wore.
KARIN: Right. Like it could have happened, it could have been...
DEBORAH: Do you remember the garments that she wore that stood out and that were important to you? Like I remember the buttons on the coat that my mother wore when she would drop me off at the gate for kindergarten. I remember staring at those buttons and what those buttons looked and felt like. I think there are pieces of it that come back if you sit with it.
KARIN: I love this idea of embodied writing. Do you think the main way into embodied writing is through the sensory details? Is there anything else?
DEBORAH: I think you start with the senses, and then you're just aware of what you're feeling in your body while you're writing about a particular event. And then you share it with readers and you see if it's being communicated. Are they feeling it in their bodies? If they're not feeling it, then what's missing? What is keeping them from getting there?
KARIN: What aspects of writing this book were the most challenging for you?
DEBORAH: I think the depth of feeling that you get to—when you're writing about sad or tragic or disturbing events—can hit you really hard. I think you can be surprised by how much feeling is still there.
I had to write about my father's psychotic break. I wasn't sure for a long time how crazy he really was. He'd always been neurotic and eccentric, and then there was a point at which he was certifiably psychotic. So trying to parse out that moment and how that felt... because when somebody goes crazy, there's a level at which you feel betrayed, like they've abandoned you. So getting to that, those feelings of abandonment and for how long I would try to justify or rationalize how crazy he was and then what it felt like to realize that he was psychotic and that I had to separate from that state of mind or I was going to go nuts too. There were feelings there that I didn't anticipate and that I couldn't have anticipated.
I also had to write about Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, because I was at the Ambassador Hotel the night he was assassinated. For years I'd really avoided looking at the video of it or even thinking too much about it because I was still so grief-stricken. It was still so painful to remember that night. To check on the details, I had to go back and look at TV newscasts. I went to the UCLA film archive, and looked at old film footage. I had to re-immerse myself in that night. I tried to find reporters still alive who’d been there that night and could give me some missing details. There were a lot of feelings I still had that I hadn't felt for years.
KARIN: Are you good at taking care of yourself through all of that?
DEBORAH: Probably not, because I would sit and write for hours and hours and hours and hours. And there were days I was writing this book where I was finding it pretty disturbing. But I think I know what I should have been doing to take care of myself. I can tell other people what they should be doing.
KARIN: What should they be doing?
DEBORAH: Well, eating and drinking and getting up every hour and walking around and not writing about the most disturbing content for hours and hours at a time. And just reassuring yourself that that's not your current life. Whatever happened, it's over.
I say to my students, drop crumbs on the way in so you can find your way back out. Like Hansel and Gretel, only don't let the birds eat up your crumbs. So when you go into these places that you know are going to be emotionally difficult, have a plan—like I'm only going to sit and write about this for the next 45 minutes and then I'm going to go take a walk. Or anchor yourself in the present. This is not still happening right now. It might feel like it is while I'm writing about it and I might need it to feel like it's still happening while I'm writing about it, but it's really not still happening. I'm really safe and okay now.
KARIN: Would you be conscious of those thoughts afterwards?
DEBORAH: Yeah, and I think having a sense of humor. My book is funny and I had a sense of humor even as a kid going through some of this stuff, but I have a strong sense of how funny, even really tragic things can be. That's why I think my publisher calls it a tragicomic memoir, because it's funny and the humor helps. I think you can keep in touch with the humor even while you're writing about horrible stuff or you see it with a sense of irony or absurdity. A lot of what went on in my family was just absolutely absurd. It had a sort of histrionic quality. So if you can realize that while you're writing, it creates a little bit of separation.
KARIN: Right. And you don't lose the depth by focusing on that?
DEBORAH: Well, it's a balancing act. It's a trade-off. You have to stay sane while you're writing.
KARIN: What about your parents? Are they around to read this?
DEBORAH: My parents are dead, so I didn't have to worry about that.
KARIN: Is there anyone you needed to be concerned about?
DEBORAH: I have two brothers and both of my brothers are characters in the book, but it's really interesting… my family has a “don't ask, don't tell policy” about my writing, where they don't really want to know. I don't ask them to read it and they don't ask to read it. One brother recently said to me, “Do you think it would be upsetting to me to read your book?” And I said, “I don't know… you're in it.” And he said, “Well, yeah, and I'm not sure if I want to.” They're not the kind of family who will read it and get offended. They just won't read it.
KARIN: Did you change names?
DEBORAH: I changed my family members’ names. I wrote it with a sense of empathy for everybody involved and tried to be fair. There's no victim/perpetrator mentality. That ruins a lot of memoirs.
If my parents were alive, would it be a different book? I don't know. I don't know if I'd be writing this book if my parents were still alive. I'm not sure.
KARIN: You mentioned that you're apprehensive about feeling exposed upon the release of your memoir, even though you've written and published quite a bit. What is that about?
DEBORAH: Yeah, I did not anticipate how exposed I would feel. When I was writing some of the book, I wasn't thinking about anybody reading it, which sounds kind of nuts. Even though my writers’ group was reading it, I wasn't thinking about a public reading it. And there was an impulse to just lay it all out, almost in a confessional way—just lay it all out, have no secrets. And then when I realized that the book was actually coming out in the world, I thought, Oh my God, what did I do? What did I write? Yeah, so I do feel exposed and wonder what will happen when more people read it and I get more feedback.
KARIN: What are you most concerned about?
DEBORAH: I guess my mind goes to people saying, “Wow, you were really nuts. Your family was really nuts.” It's the unknown. It's not knowing how people will react. Like at my 10th birthday party, when my father put on the outfit that he wears on the cover of the book, which was a little Lord Fauntleroy 19th century child outfit… that party wound up not going so well because the other kids thought his behavior was really bizarre.
I didn't anticipate the extent to which they would think it was bizarre. I thought they would think it was fun because I always thought it was fun that he dressed up like a child and could play. I guess it's wondering about that same feeling I had at my 10th birthday party where I saw the other kids go, “Oh, this is way too weird.”
KARIN: Do you think that writing this story shifted anything for you?
DEBORAH: Oh, absolutely. It was therapeutic. I think you have to be careful that you're not just doing therapy when you're writing, that you're also creating something for other people. But of course you get clarity and revelation and epiphany and figure out things you never understood before. Just shaping your experiences changes the way you see them and feel about them.
KARIN: Is there anything specific that you're able to put into words?
DEBORAH: There were so many little revelations and so many little epiphanies along the way. There's something satisfying once it's a book and you can hold it in your hand and feel like you've actually created this object. I'm not sure if there's any one thing that I understood differently, that I can point to. There were so many little things along the way. I think every time you're sitting down to write an episode, you're having little revelations about it. Don't you find that when you're teaching your students, that they're constantly having “Oh, wow?” moments?
KARIN: Yes, I find it’s an organic, unfolding process. The whole thing is transformative.
DEBORAH: I think I realized the extent to which I had been holding on to this idea that my father was not crazy until he was. Until he went psychotic, he wasn't really crazy. And while writing the book, I had to question how crazy was he before he went psychotic. How many crazy ideas did he impart to me when I thought he was just neurotic? I had to rethink a lot of what I had taken as reality. Because he had a lot of nutty ideas before he was ever officially psychotic. And is it a spectrum? Or is there really a point at which you fall off the ledge? I still don't know.
KARIN: Do you do have perspective on that now?
DEBORAH: I think it's a spectrum. I think he definitely had psychotic ideas. I don't think he was completely out of touch with reality. But he had ideas that were not reality-based. For example, there's an episode in the book where my mom has a migraine headache and my dad has to make lunch. So we're opening cans for lunch. And whenever he opened cans, we had to stand around and listen for the pfftt, the sound of the air entering the vacuum-packed chamber of the can. Because if we didn't do that, he thought we would all die of botulism.
It was completely irrational because botulism is an anaerobe that can only live in a sealed can. It made no logical sense, but it was an emotional ritual for him. Was that pretty nutty? Yeah, that was pretty nutty.
KARIN: What would you say to the writers out there who know they have a book in them, but can’t yet see it?
DEBORAH: I say just start to put it together and see what you have to start—take those episodes and put them up against one another. I think, especially now, people are writing a lot of experimental forms. They're writing a lot of things that don't look like conventional narratives that work So don't assume that it has to be a linear story. But I think you just have to start putting things next to each other and seeing what happens. There's a certain energy that comes from juxtaposing one episode with another.
KARIN: And yet the editor you worked with encouraged you towards a linear narrative.
DEBORAH: He helped me create more of a linear narrative. But that was a few years ago. I think that times have already changed in terms of what's getting published and how linear a narrative needs to be. I think you put what you have together and then you see what's missing. Is it years that are missing? Is it a formative moment? I tried to include the formative moments. That's one way to think about it: what are the formative moments?
KARIN: When you think of unconventional memoirs, are there any in particular that come to mind you have enjoyed?
DEBORAH: Paul Lisicky’s book Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, which just came out, about his early years coming out as gay at the height of the AIDS epidemic in Provincetown. It's not linear in its organization, and I think it, totally works. Also, Sarah Manguso's books, especially Ongoingness: the End of a Diary. And Maggie Nelson’s works. Those are just a few examples.
KARIN: How do you find a structure in something like that?
DEBORAH: I think there has to be some kind of emotional throughline and maybe a metaphorical throughline. What are the metaphors that keep repeating? What are the objects that keep showing up? Because sometimes an object that you saw every day in your childhood can become a metaphor for much more than itself.
I just taught this book by Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It. He reports this episode where his mother who was a drunk, as was his father, burns a cigarette hole in her dress one night on her way out to a party, and she has to come back and change. That hole in her party dress becomes a symbol for so much in his childhood that went wrong, and for how his parents were trying to maintain this veneer of respectability when they were going downhill as drunks and that hole in her dress just takes on more and more resonance, the further the book goes along.
Look for those symbols, those objects that can take on more meaning than they might seem to have at first.
KARIN: Thank you for all of these wonderful insights. Do you think some of your upcoming events over the next few months might still happen?
DEBORAH: Well, events are being rescheduled for July. I’m happy that my reading at Antioch University’s Literary Uprising will still take place as a virtual event on May 12th at 5:30 p.m. There’ll be info about how to join on Antioch’s website and on my Facebook page. I’m doing some podcasts and radio too. No one knows how the next few months are going to go; we’ll all just have to see.
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To learn more about Deborah A. Lott, visit her website.
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