You'll find some rock solid advice in my conversation with author Erin Khar, whose memoir Strung Out hit the shelves during the pandemic. Erin established herself as a writer through an advice column on topics related to addiction and recovery, and she's offering a ton of it here to those who are writing memoir. She shares the quickest way to create a platform, how memoirs are getting sold to the big publishing houses, and why she thinks anyone looking to publish a book should invest in a therapist!
ERIN KHAR is the author of STRUNG OUT, a memoir about her 15-year battle with opiate addiction that explores the very nature of why people do drugs, casting light on the larger opiate crisis, written with the intention to de-stigmatize the topic of drug addiction.
Erin's work has appeared many places, including Marie Claire, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Salon, The Times of London Sunday Magazine, The Rumpus, HuffPost, and SELF. Her syndicated advice column, Ask Erin, can be read each week HERE.
She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.
KARIN GUTMAN: When did you know you had a book in you?
ERIN KHAR: I thought I might be headed towards a memoir, because I was back in school. I was a year shy of finishing my degree. So, I went back to school with a focus on writing, and the first class that I took was a personal essay class. My professor said, “I think you have a memoir in you,” and that put the first seed in my head. At that point, I'd had a few pieces published, but not a whole lot.
KARIN: What had you published? Things related to the memoir?
ERIN: Yeah, I think mostly everything I'd published at that point was related to addiction and recovery.
KARIN: So, was writing something you were pursuing head on?
ERIN: I was pursuing it pretty head on. My goal was to finish school and then to start working as a freelance writer. I had an advice column that I had started on my blog, that moved to a feminist website called Ravishly, maybe a year later. I ended up becoming an editor there and then the managing editor of that website.
KARIN: Where did the idea for the advice column come from?
ERIN: It was completely organic. I started the blog in the end of 2009 on Blogspot, as a way to get into a daily writing practice. My blog was called “Rarely wrong, Erin.” And the tagline was: “Rarely wrong, seldom right.” My friends always came to me for advice, even when I wasn't in the greatest shape, even in the height of drug addiction. So, it just seemed like a natural thing. It grew really organically to the point that I had a good audience. At the height of popularity on Ravishly it had a half million readers, which was insane. Now it's on my own website and I still have about 100,000 readers a month, which is pretty cool. I'm not getting paid to do it anymore, but I'm still doing it.
KARIN: Did writing the advice column feed your memoir?
ERIN: It certainly gave me a platform that helps sell the book, because I had an engaged audience that was interested in what I had to say. The voice of my advice column was very much the voice of the book.
KARIN: So, how did it evolve into a book?
ERIN So, as I said, I started writing personal essays and articles. I had a couple of articles that went a little bit viral, one of them was for Marie Claire.
KARIN: What was it about?
ERIN: I think they have a salacious title for it like, “My Secret Drug Addiction At Age 13,” and I realized the response to these very personal essays was quite large. I knew that I had to get the story out before I moved on to anything else. It served two purposes: the purpose of following this passion that I had for writing, but also, I felt like it might help people.
In the meantime, my agents read a piece of short fiction that I wrote on Cosmonauts Avenue, a small literary site. They contacted me to see what I was working on. I said, I'm working on this proposal for a memoir. They wanted to know what it was about. I told them and they said, Great, circle back to us when you're done with the proposal.
I sent them sample pages of my prologue and the first chapter, and they said, Come in and meet with us since you're in New York. They sold me on their agency, and it was a good agency, and I signed with them. We worked on the proposal for about eight months, and then it went out on submission. Two weeks later, it went to auction and I ended up at the house that I wanted to be at, so I was very happy about that. I feel really fortunate. It was fairly easy. I didn't query agents. That doesn't mean that any of it was easy in terms of the work.
KARIN: TNormalhat's the dream, you put your work out there and someone notices it. Did they know about your advice column and following?
ERIN: I suspect that it was definitely part of the reason they wanted to sign me, because it can be challenging with memoir. I have a lot of friends who are amazing writers and they'll hear things like, Well, you don't have enough of a platform. Platform really isn't about your social media followers. It can be a number of things, like consistently writing on the subject for top tier publications or being an expert speaker on the subject. It could also be because you have a large social media following. It's unfortunately an essential part of the package. It's not impossible to get an agent and a book deal without it, but you're helping yourself so much if you establish a platform for yourself. I don't have a huge social media following. I have less than 5,000 followers on each platform. But I had an engaged audience, and I had written a lot on the subject for decent publications.
If it's any consolation, my book came out 10 days before we went into lockdown for COVID. So that part of it was not ideal.
KARIN: Did you have a whole tour prepared?
Erin: I was on tour and came home early. I did my first four appearances and then the next 19 got cancelled.
KARIN: That’s really unfortunate.
ERIN: One thing I would advise, for anyone who's looking to publish a book, is to have a support system set up in advance. For me, I take psychiatric medication, so I have a psychiatrist who manages my medication. I have a therapist whom I see weekly. I had those things in place beforehand, because I knew that no matter what happened with the book I would need that kind of support.
My psychiatrist said that the book is only one part of your life, no matter what happens with it, and I tried to remember that, both when really big, good things happened and when COVID happened. I had to really remind myself on a regular basis that it was one part of who I was, not the whole picture, right? Because when you're leading up to publication, especially in my case, I had a lot of support from my publisher. I was a lead title. I went to media training. I had a lot of press. All of that was great. But I was so focused on the book for the year leading up to publication, like you've been running, running, running, and then suddenly everyone stops, and that was a jarring feeling. I think having that reminder for myself helped.
KARIN: Maybe we should all have a therapist on point.
ERIN: I think so. Especially when you're writing about personal things, because invariably no matter what you're writing about, there are going to be people who read the book and just don't like you—as the Narrator, as the main character in the book. And that is going to make them not like the book. Whereas when you're writing fiction, if they're saying they don't like the character, it's a character. With memoir, it's so personal.
I recently had somebody compile my worst reviews and put them in an email to me. It was an anonymous person through my contact form.
KARIN: That's just pure evil.
ERIN: It’s a lot easier for people to be mean from behind the computer. When I had the Marie Claire article come out, there were people in the comment section that said things like, Oh, the world would be better off if you had died, or that they feel sorry for my children. You know, why didn't I have an abortion? I don’t even take offense to that because it’s so ridiculous.
KARIN: It’s easy to be cruel, especially when it's anonymous.
Can you talk more about the book proposal?
ERIN: My agents do not sell any memoir on full manuscript. My agent only sells memoir on proposal. I think every single person I know in the last 5-6 years who sold a memoir, sold it on proposal. They did not submit a finished manuscript. That said, I know there are people who've gotten book deals by submitting their full memoir, but I think it's less common than it used to be. I was told by my agents that editors may have a certain idea of how they see the book being shaped. They may not be able to see their vision for the book if you're handing the completed manuscript, because memoir is so much about marketing it to the right audience.
KARIN: That’s interesting to hear.
ERIN: I'm talking about the big five publishing houses, or now it's the big three because they've all combined. I have a friend whose book didn't sell when her agent had it on submission. And then she took it back and finished the manuscript. She ended up publishing it through the Santa Fe Writers’ Project, which is both the contest and they are a really good independent publisher. So, a lot of the smaller independent publishers do want completed manuscripts. It's just from what I have seen with the top houses, they're only looking at proposals for memoir.
For example, I don't know if you read Stephanie Land’s book Maid? We have the same agent. Her book is huge. They just made it into a Netflix series. Hers was a proposal like Lauren Hough’s books were sold on proposal.
My proposal was an 80-page document. I had 35-40 pages of the marketing, chapter summaries, comps, platform, all of that, and then another 40 pages of sample chapters.
You're going to see all different sorts of examples if you look at book proposals, but the way that my agents do it is that they want the chapter summaries to read like a mini version of the book, so that when an editor reads through the chapter summaries they really get your voice. It took a long time to do this. I think the proposal is harder to write than the book. 100%. It took me eight months to do the proposal. And then when I got my book deal, I handed in my manuscript in three months. I do tend to write fast, but the proposal was much harder for me.
KARIN: The way you’re describing it, I’m imagining that the proposal lays out the logic of the narrative and how it builds.
ERIN: When I've helped people with proposals, there's your larger narrative arc, and then each chapter has its own narrative arc that could stand alone. But you're seeing the action propel forward. It really gives you an architecture for the book. I wouldn't have written the book that I wrote if I hadn't done the proposal first. For me personally, I wouldn't write a nonfiction book without a proposal. Fiction I work very differently, but for nonfiction I need that architecture.
KARIN: What kind of notes did you get from the editor?
ERIN: There wasn't anything major. There were certain places where she wanted me to go a little deeper, into more detail. My contract was for 65,000 to 80,000 words. But my editor and I both agreed to go longer. The book begins with the present day and then flashes back to age 13 in the first chapter, and then moves forward in time. So, you've got a good 30 years.
KARIN: Your voice is so accessible. You write great dialogue.
ERIN: I have been really fortunate that I've kept journals my entire life, from the time I was eight years old. When I went to write the memoir, not only did I have all of those journals, but there were several years where I had been writing letters back and forth with my best friend. We would write a letter over the course of a few days. I'd be like, Well then he said… and then I said, and write actual dialogue. We also made audio tapes for each other, where it's just me talking. So, I was able to listen back to myself telling a story about what happened, which was very helpful. There are pieces of dialogue in the book that are completely transcribed from my journals and letters. That said, they're never going to be 100% accurate because it’s still going to be my interpretation or memory of what happened, so I think that's why memoir isn't journalism, right? It's one person's viewpoint of these events and how they changed them and others.
I'm very visual. I think about books as if they were movies. I play out scenes in my head and if I'm going to write a scene, I try and latch on to one sense memory, whether it's the smell, or the temperature, or a sound, or how my body physically felt something. That's where I'll start. If I don't have the actual dialogue written down, then I will take the time to remember what was said, and of course, I can't say that it's 100% accurate, but the gist of it is very true.
I like dialogue because it makes a memoir a read like a novel to me. As much as I can easily keep somebody inside my head for the whole story, that can feel claustrophobic for a reader. They need to be outside of your head, too. I think dialogue achieves that and it keeps things moving and keeps you as the narrator in an active role. So yeah, dialogue is definitely something that I lean into. It's one of my strengths, I think.
Obviously, every memoirist is going to have a different strength—yours might not be dialogue, yours may be setting a sense of place. I think it's okay to lean into those things.
KARIN: How did you think about the arc, especially given that it spans so much time?
ERIN: What helped me with the arc is that I bookended the narrative with this conversation with my son. So, the book opens with my son asking me, “Mom, did you ever do drugs?” which is something that really happened. The whole book is me trying to answer that question. When I looked at it that way, a natural arc fell into place.
There are plenty of things that didn't make it in. There's an element of sexual abuse in my story, and there are people that wish I had spent more time on that or answered more questions about it, but it really wasn't a book about sexual abuse. With a lot of memoir, so many of us are writing about trauma. And trauma doesn't record in our brains the same way like an everyday memory would, so I may not have answers for some of these questions. And I think that that's okay. I don't think you have to tell the reader everything.
I think that it's important to be transparent. I knew going in that I had to be willing to be unlikable. Otherwise, I wasn't going to be able to write an honest story.
There's so much that comes up about, Whose story is it to tell? Obviously, when you're writing memoir, you're going to be writing about other people. But I really made a conscious effort and checked myself consistently that as I was telling the story, that it was my story to tell. So, there are details about my parents’ marriage that are not in the book, because it wasn't necessary, and it wasn't my story to tell. I was very conscious and conscientious about that, intentionally.
KARIN: This brings up the ethics of memoir…
ERIN: I changed all names. I changed every name except for my son and my husband, because I had already written about them in other publications and use their real names. A lot of publications including the New York Times will not let you use pseudonyms. But they also came after all the drugs, so they weren't implicated.
KARIN: Do you share the same last name as your husband?
No, I don't share the same last name as anyone in my family, including my parents, because my last name is an abbreviation of my maiden name, which I started using when I was a teenager as an actress. I just kept it and I'm so glad that I did. At a certain point, I was going to go back to my original maiden name and then I thought, No, because now everybody's protected. Right?
I pay for a service called Delete Me, so if people Google my name and try and find out what my father's name is, or my mother's name, or my husband's name, they cannot find it the way that you normally can. You can ask for your information to be manually removed from all of those sites. You can't find my addresses. You can't find people whom I've been associated with name-wise. It's just constantly scraping your information off the internet.
KARIN: That is smart!
Can you tell us more about how the structure fell into place?
ERIN: Sure. Originally, I wanted something that was not as linear, that started at a midpoint and then went forward and back. But ultimately, I wanted to write a book that a larger number of people would find accessible to read. So, I didn't want to write something that people would be put off by because it was more experimental or too lyrical. Although I love lyrical language, and I have moments of it in the book, I wanted to make sure that the voice was clear and accessible and relatable, because I wanted people to understand addiction in ways that they hadn't before. It wasn't just about me, it was also about the mechanics of addiction and how this is a subject that people are afraid to talk about even though everybody knows somebody who's dealt with it. There's still so much stigma around it, and I want people to have a better understanding that we're more similar than dissimilar. So many people said they couldn't believe how much they related to what I was going through internally, even though they had never experienced addiction.
KARIN: Was it cathartic to write your story?
ERIN: For me, the catharsis needed to occur before I wrote the book, because I needed to have that distance. I wrote about my worst years of addiction, but now I'm in recovery for 18 and a half years, so I have perspective that I wouldn't have if these things had happened a year ago. There's this mythology around memoir that it's just like writing a diary and that it must have been so easy to write. No, because as you know from studying this stuff, it's really about taking a personal story and crafting it into a narrative. And in memoir, I believe you're representing multiple characters in the book. There's you as the narrator, you as the person you were at different points within the memoir who doesn't have the perspective that the narrator does, and then you as the writer who is in conversation with the reader. So that's something that I was aware of as I was writing it, and that made it a lot easier to shift between the voice of Erin at 13 and the Narrator, who has the perspective to bring the reader in with me.
For me, the creation of art is to connect with people. I believe that what moves us when we hear a poem or read a book or watch a movie or listen to a piece of music or see an abstract painting, is because there's something in that work that reflects the experience of being human. I think that's true whether it's memoir or speculative fiction or a completely abstract painting. That is what we respond to. There's a frequency that reflects what it means to be human. I think that what we're responding to isn't just pure esthetics. It's that connection with other people and how we see ourselves reflected in the artwork.
I think that's why memoir is so powerful.
KARIN: It sounds like you became aware of your audience through writing the advice column, like a training ground.
ERIN: Yeah. Also, I thought about who was reading the book. I thought about young people who might be struggling the way that I did and how they would be reading the book, and I thought about the parents who've lost children to addiction and how they might be reading the book, and how people like my parents who had a really hard time talking about addiction, how they would read the book.
Here's a really good example: When I went to rehab the first time, I was 23 years old and my dad, CEO of a big fortune 500 company, was very shut down emotionally. He was horrified that I was not only in rehab but for shooting heroin, right? This is the worst thing he can imagine. He's like, I understand addiction and alcoholism, but why do you put a needle in your arm? And then you cut to the beginning of 2020. Both my parents read the book before it came out. They did not read it while I was in the process of writing it. When the book came out, anytime someone came over for dinner, he'd be like, “You should order the book right now.” This is a guy who couldn't talk about it before.
My book was not an easy read for my parents. But they know me so much better now that they've read it. Like I said, I was very careful not to throw anyone under the bus in it. I don't blame anyone for what happened in my childhood or the things that got me from here to there because here I am, and I'm okay with who I am now.
I cast the harshest light on myself. There's nowhere in the book that I was blaming people or not taking ownership of things, even in abusive situations. Not excusing, but I'm not telling the reader how they should look at them.
KARIN: Can you give an example of what you mean?
ERIN: Like with my older son's father. We had a tumultuous relationship. He was really emotionally abusive, but I was very careful. I wanted the dynamics in our relationship to come through without going into too much detail. I have a couple of specific incidents that happened, but I didn't want to have to spell out this person as an emotional abuser because that's my kid's dad, and it's not my job to spell it out for anyone. I think you can tell a truthful story without indicting anyone. I think you can just present what happened and how you experienced it.
There's a scene where I find out that my ex-husband was still cheating on me. We have this big confrontation. I asked him if he even loved me and he said, “How could I love you, you’re a broken dog.” It's one of those moments, I'll never forget what he said. That dialogue is in the book, and I told him it was going to be in the book. I don't have to then go on to explain how fucked up I think that was. The reader can draw their own conclusions. I also show the parts of him that were good because nobody is all one thing, right? I wanted to portray anyone who was in the book for a substantial length of time in the way that you experience people—they can be a horrible jerk and also have made you feel really loved at one time.
It's funny when I had my book signing in LA, all of my friends wore name tags that said ‘Hello, my name is’ with the name of their character in the book.
KARIN: How fun!
Let’s talk about building a platform.
ERIN: The fastest way to getting a platform is to write something provocative—and I don't mean provocative in a negative way—but something that grabs people's attention, that hits a nerve resonates with people on a widely read site.
Sue Shapiro wrote a book called the Byline Bible, for building your platform. I used to do pitching workshops with her. She breaks down how to e-mail an editor, what to say, all of that kind of stuff. I think it's a numbers game, too. You're more likely to get something published if you keep sending it out and having a formula for how you pitch something. That includes understanding the publication that you're pitching to and who their audience is.
I think another big part of platform is being a good literary citizen. A lot of it is showing up in social media, engaging with other people in a meaningful way, promoting other writers’ work. I do a thing every Monday, which is like my Monday reading thread, where I share articles and essays and things that I've read through the week. I do a Twitter thread promoting everybody's work. I have really good relationships with a lot of editors. Even if I'm not actively publishing with their publication, they've been super supportive of my work, because I've really been supportive of their publication. It's like that.
Having a literary community supporting you is part of marketing and part of your platform because you have a network of people. For example, I had a whole spreadsheet of editors and writers who I knew I could contact when the book was coming out. I posted something in my writing groups on Facebook and on Twitter that ARC's (advanced reader copies) were coming out if anyone wanted to do a review. I had a huge response from that. My NPR review was from somebody who said, Yeah, I'd love to have a copy. So, I think that's how you build community and platform.
Supporting other writers brings back a lot to you as well. There are some writers that you're going to support constantly and they'll never throw you a bone. It doesn't matter. I don't even pay attention. I just like doing it because I love writers. I want to support them. I want our words to be seen.
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To learn more about Erin Khar visit her site.
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