Below you’ll find my interview with Nashville author Mary Laura Philpott, whose memoir Bomb Shelter (which she calls a "domestic memoir") hit the shelves in April. She shares about how the pandemic revealed some new insights about her working habits, how she approaches essay writing, and how the emotional plot informs a story's structure. She also talks about her personal ethics when it comes to writing about her family.
MARY LAURA PHILPOTT, nationally bestselling author of I Miss You When I Blink and Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives, writes about the overlap of the absurd and the profound in everyday life. Her writing has been featured by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among many other publications. A former bookseller, she also hosted an interview program on Nashville Public Television for several years. Mary Laura lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her family.
A lifelong worrier, Philpott always kept an eye out for danger, a habit that only intensified when she became a parent. But she looked on the bright side, too, believing that as long as she cared enough, she could keep her loved ones safe.
Then, in the dark of one quiet, pre-dawn morning, she woke abruptly to a terrible sound--and found her teenage son unconscious on the floor. In the aftermath of a crisis that darkened her signature sunny spirit, she wondered: If this happened, what else could happen? And how do any of us keep going when we can't know for sure what's coming next?
KARIN GUTMAN: You wrote Bomb Shelter during the pandemic. What was that experience like for you?
MARY LAURA PHILPOTT: Well, you know, everything fell away. All of a sudden, I had these very long, uninterrupted work days to write and I've never had that before. Kind of on purpose. I used to think that I did my best work when I was multitasking. For 40 something years I actually thought, I am at my best when I'm juggling a whole bunch of jobs. And then when the pandemic made me stop juggling, and I had just this project every day and I was staying immersed in it from day into night and into the next day—oh my gosh—I found out I was wrong. I actually do much better work when I'm immersed in one thing. I don't know how I'm ever going to replicate that again in my life. I might have to just pretend there's a pandemic. That was some self-discovery for me.
KARIN: What did you learn?
MARY LAURA: When you are really in the flow of a project, and it's going well, and you're having a good writing day, it's like you have fully transported to go live within the walls of that world. And then you have to put it away and go back to real life and you're in your kitchen or your actual office of your day job or you're in your car driving to the grocery store, whatever. The real world comes back in, and then you have to make time to dig all the way back down to that tunnel of where your work lives. When I had that uninterrupted time, I was able to stay in it. I wasn't getting out and then going back into it. I was wasting a lot less time walking myself back to the headspace of that project.
But I can only write from after breakfast until one or two o'clock. That's a good, long day if I can write to one or two. But then I still had all these hours to fill being quiet staying out of everyone's way. So, I started what I called “afternoon story school” where I read every day, with the intention of absorbing tricks and tools and techniques that I could apply to the book I was working on. So reading with a pencil in my hand. I can write an essay with one hand tied behind my back, but I wanted Bomb Shelter to read like a memoir. I wanted people to get the same satisfaction that you would get out of a novel that has drama and humor and dialogue, and you know, all the elements of story.
I had my mom's voice in my head. One time she called me, and she was like, “What should I read?” I started naming memoirs and she said, “I don't want a memoir. I want a story.” And I thought, that's a perception people have that memoir is not a story and I'm going to make this one just as satisfying as a novel. So I read thrillers, I read romance. I was really just studying, Okay, how does good dialogue work? How does pacing work in a story? How do you expand and contract the pacing to make people's hearts race or make them want to turn the next page? And then before I went to bed, I would inevitably have one or two thoughts like, Oh, I know what I want to do. So every night I would send myself an email with the subject line “book.” Then the next day I would open my email and there were the ideas I wanted to start with.
KARIN: How did the premise for the book come about?
When I had finished with the first chunk of book tour for I Miss You When I Blink, I remember thinking: I have no more ideas. I have nothing else to write about. I will never write another book. I've had my last good idea. I hope everyone enjoyed it. It's over. Meanwhile, everything that I write about in Bomb Shelter had happened. It was all right there. But I was like, Nope, I got nothing, we're gonna get a different job now.
Once I had mentally closed the lifecycle of I Miss You When I Blink, my brain finally was like, Oh hey, you can think about something else. And then all this stuff came pouring in, all these stories. A lot of Bomb Shelter is about this two-year period of my life after I found my son unconscious, and we realized he had epilepsy. Everything that had been stable in my life destabilized. And so, I had this period of trying to figure out: how do I either re-stabilize everything or figure out how to move on and live in an unstable world?
So I'm curious… I have no idea what my next book could be. But I do at least have a tiny bit of faith that something will come to me because it did last time. We'll see.
KARIN: It’s important to trust the ebb and flow of the creative process.
MARY LAURA: I keep getting asked, Was it easier to write a second book? No, unfortunately, sadly, it is difficult. It's very hard every time, but once you've lived through the whole lifecycle of one book, it does give you faith in the hard parts of the lifecycle on the next one. When you're like, I am 30,000 words into this and I'm going to have to throw it all away. I am a fraud. I should never have thought I could do this. Oh my God, I need a new job. It gives you faith when you're in those moments that, Oh yeah, this is the part where I think I can’t do this. This lasts like three weeks, and then I'm going to come out on the other side.
KARIN: Did you ever hit a stuck point while writing Bomb Shelter?
MARY LAURA: Oh several. More than I can count.
KARIN: How did you handle it?
MARY LAURA: If you're doing a book-length project, you have to think about a big picture sometimes in order to put the little pieces in place. Where's my narrative arc? To remind yourself, Wait, what's the big question I'm trying to answer? What's my big theme? But if I stayed in that big-picture-land for too long, I would get overwhelmed. So it would help me in those moments to kind of be like, Okay, no more big picture. Back to, What am I working on today? Let's look at this paragraph. Today I'm wrestling with this paragraph. If I can wrestle it to the ground by the end of my work day, I'm good. It's kind of like meditation, that centering. Looking at the step in front of you.
KARIN: You refer to the book as a “Memoir in Essays.” Why that term?
MARY LAURA: The way I think about memoir and essays and everything in between is a spectrum. On one side you've got essay collection—you have compiled a bunch of pieces and they are all linked by something, either they're all on the same topic or the same theme or they all take place in the same place. Over here, you've got memoir, a story that almost reads like a novel except it was something that was true. It's one big story. A memoir in essays could be anything in between.
I think of my two books a little bit differently on that spectrum. I Miss You When I Blink is a memoir in essays, but it's definitely an essay collection. You could pick it up, flip to the middle and start any essay and not be confused. There's not one main story going start to finish that you're going to get lost on. It is indeed coded as an essay collection. I think of it that way because the link is a little looser. There's a thematic link to those essays, but not necessarily a narrative thread straight through.
I think of Bomb Shelter as a memoir. It is built out of essay-like chapters. Anytime you give me 2000 words to write something, it's going to be shaped like an essay, because that is just what I do. It's what I've done my whole life. But it is coded as a memoir. You wouldn't want to pick it up and flip to page 150 and start reading there, that wouldn't make any sense at all. You need to read it start to finish.
The idea of a memoir in essays can sound very tempting to a writer who is in the early stages of a project, because it sounds like a way out of having to figure out your main thematic question and how all these pieces relate.
With I Miss You When I Blink, I was at that point where I had a bunch of essays. I made myself try to figure out the order of the essays, which I did by spreading them out all over my living room floor and taking a pair of scissors and literally cutting them into pieces. It was then that I figured out, Okay, there's a little bit of a thematic thread starting to come together here and I need to follow that and complete this book with essays that actually address that theme. In that book, it's very much about my 30s, the time where the momentum of early adulthood had started to slow and I finally had time to look up and around at my life and go, Well, this is not really where I meant to be. How do I start over without blowing my whole life up? And once I saw this emotional plotline that I had created on the floor, I could see where the gaps were. I could see, Oh, I have neglected to tell the dark night of the soul part, you know, I need a couple of essays that show what this was like at its worst.
Bomb Shelter fell into a more natural order because I was telling a story that began within a certain incident. I knew where it was going to land. I knew that that story thread that would keep you turning pages would also enable us to take some digressions into other stories and other essays. I did still end up spreading it out all over the floor, though, just because when I can see something physically in front of me, I can picture that that that graph of the highs and lows. And I'm a big believer that structure is story—the order you put chapters or essays in actually determines the story you're telling. If I moved a different essay to the beginning, it would be a whole different book because everything that comes after is answering that question or responding to that thing.
KARIN: How do you think about plot when writing memoir?
MARY LAURA: The emotional plot and the events you're writing about are not same thing. One thing I learned from reading thrillers and murder mysteries is: the events are the plot.
In a memoir, or at least in the kind I write, the plot is:
Once upon a time there was a woman who loved having a sense of control and that made her feel peaceful and happy. She believed that if she just loved everybody in her life enough, they would all be safe. And then one day, her world is turned upside down because this unforeseen, horrific thing happened. She has to figure out, Can I regain control of everything by loving everyone hard enough, or if that's impossible and my whole worldview is built on a misperception, how do I find my way back to peace and happiness?
That's an emotional plot that I can then tack different events to.
KARIN: Do you think about what’s saleable when you’re writing?
MARY LAURA: Anybody has a disadvantage if you're not writing whatever the hot thing is. Right now, the hot thing is romance. If you can write a book with some steamy sex scenes, maybe with a monster also, you're gonna make a million bucks. It's great.
The quiet domestic memoir about an internal world is not the hot thing. However, I'm a big believer that you can trust readers. I've been a reader of real-life memoirs about ordinary people. I love them. I think when they're done really well, when the author can give you what feels like a good story and also gives you words for what the human experience feels like so that you as a reader come away going—That's what I feel like, oh my gosh, it's such a relief to have words for that—I do think people buy that. I know that I crave that kind of book. I go looking for it in a bookstore, so I believe it is real. There probably are publishers who have no interest in that. But I found publishers who are.
I try not to think too hard about “Will this sell? and “What category is it?” because first and foremost, you've got to tell a good story.
KARIN: You say you are an essayist at heart. What tips do you have for writing a good essay?
MARY LAURA: Yeah, I love a good essay. I love the constraints of it. You've got 2,000 words to wrestle with this question or idea or story and you've got to land somewhere at the end. You can’t wander all over the place. It makes you be efficient. It's also a nice way to get a little bit of instant gratification. You think about how long it takes to get any kind of gratification on a book. At least if you sell one piece at a time, it's like, Yay, something that other people can see, so they know I have a real job!
Most of the time, when I'm giving feedback on an essay, it's about finding that emotional thread or plot and figuring out—What is the character looking for? Or what was their big misperception that changed? Or what did they want, that they either got or didn't get? And how did that change them?
Every now and then I'll read something where that plot has been lost. It’s like, these are beautiful sentences and this is an amazing thing that happened, but I haven't gone anywhere with that character by the end. They haven't changed. So, why did I read this?
KARIN: Do you think of the stakes of a story when you write?
MARY LAURA: I do, but I'm also a big believer that what look like low stakes can be high stakes, if they matter in that emotional plot. As I was saying earlier, I love to read memoirs about ordinary people just surviving life, as we all know it. I also do love a good memoir about escaping from a cult or pulling off a heist, I'm totally on board with that. Those are books where the stakes are obviously very high. Either you escaped with the bag of money or the cops shoot you and you're dead. The stakes may not seem as high in a book about, Something came along that threatened my family but then they were okay. Kind of looks like everything's okay from the outside. But actually, I—this “me” character—I'm forever changed. I will never be able to go back to the way I was. So, I'm either stuck here trying to go backwards, or I've got to figure out how to go forward and find peace again. That's high stakes. It's a suffer or find peace, which we’re all going through on some level.
KARIN: Do you typically know what you’re writing about in the early stages of a project?
MARY LAURA: I usually do think I know what I'm writing about. I think, Oh, I'm gonna tell you this story as a way of proving this point. Often what happens is, while I'm telling that story and digging down into the emotional core of each scene, I realize, Oh, I'm making a whole different point than I thought I was. Very often an essay ends in an utterly different place than where I thought it would. It's that digging down within each scene to find the right emotional language. Asking myself, Okay, what was my motivation here? What was I really feeling? As I do that, from scene to scene, it builds that emotional plot. I learn a lot about myself through writing, through questioning my emotions and motivations in particular scenes.
KARIN: How do you handle the ethics of memoir and writing about your family?
MARY LAURA: It’s been my practice until now that I only write my own story. I'm not here to write anybody else's story. So, if I'm trying to tell you a story, and it includes an experience that I’ve had that overlaps with someone else's experience, I'll just leave that experience out if possible. But if I need to tell the story, I just leave them out and I tell you my part. That works 90% of the time.
For Bomb Shelter, I needed you to feel everything I felt in that moment when I heard a noise at 4am and I woke up and I went to investigate and I found my son unconscious on the bathroom floor. I needed to give you what that day looked and felt like. However, I don't need to give you what that day looked and felt like to him. It's not a “Once upon a time, there was a boy and this happened to him.” It was “Once upon a time, there was a mother and here's what she experienced.”
And then I put other guardrails in place. I don't develop my family members as full characters. Except my husband because he's my character foil in a lot of stories. All you need to know about my children is enough to inform the scenes that move my character forward.
That’s how I negotiated those boundaries. It is different for every writer. It's different for every project. It's different for every motive. People write books for different reasons. I don't write books as a way of writing a letter to my loved ones. I don't write books for revenge. I'm not interested in imagining what it must have been like to be my grandmother—but I know people who write books like that and they're fascinating, people who put themselves back in someone else's perspective and tell the story. So, it's a very personal question. The way I wrestled with it was specific to my priorities, which are to protect the privacy of my loved ones, and professionally, to tell a good story.
If I weren't in it to deliver a good story and a good feeling of human connection and to give people words for their emotions, I wouldn’t make it a book. I could just keep a really great journal and that would be awesome.
KARIN: I think this idea of giving people language for their human experience is so important.
MARY LAURA: Books have done that for me so many times. So, I wanted to do that in my own way.
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To learn more about Mary Laura Philpott visit her site.
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