A Conversation with Rebecca Woolf

I am excited to share the thought-provoking conversation I had with Rebecca Woolf, author of All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire. We talked about the return to long-form blogging on Substack, the question of boundaries and secrets and shame when writing memoir, and reinventing story structure through a female lens. This woman needs to do a TEDTalk!

Rebecca will be signing books at the grand opening of Zibby's Bookshop on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica the weekend of February 18th & 19th. Come on down to check it out and meet some other local authors including Leslie Lehr, Terri Cheney, Hope Edelman, Claire Bidwell Smith, Annabelle Gurwitch, among others, including Zibby Owens herself!

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REBECCA WOOLF has worked as a freelance writer since age 16 when she became a leading contributor to the hit 90s book series, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.

Since then, she has contributed to numerous publications, websites and anthologies, most notably her own award-winning personal blog, Girl’s Gone Child, which attracted millions of unique visitors worldwide. 

She has appeared on CNN and NPR and has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine and New York Mag.

She lives in Los Angeles with her son and three daughters.

After years of struggling in a tumultuous marriage, Rebecca Woolf was finally ready to leave her husband. Two weeks after telling him she wanted a divorce, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Four months later, at the age of 44, he died.

In her memoir All of This, she chronicles the months before her husband’s death—and her rebirth after he was gone. With rigorous honesty and incredible awareness, she reflects on the end of her marriage: how her husband’s illness finally gave her the space to make peace with his humanity and her own.

KARIN GUTMAN:  You began writing as a blogger and now you’re on Substack. What do you think of this relatively new platform for writers?
 
REBECCA WOOLF:  I just posted my first post this morning, and I had this feeling of, Oh my God, am I going to do this again? So many mixed feelings. It's a really interesting moment to talk about memoir because I’ve been doing it all my life, obviously, but I'm going back to my roots of blogging.
 
KARIN:  All of the people I’m following on Substack were original bloggers.
 
REBECCA:  I think there's a return. We're seeing the social media platforms implode and realizing that our content doesn't belong to us when it's on other websites. It's different when it's in your own space, and I think it's brilliant.
 
KARIN:  What was it like when you were first starting out?
 
REBECCA:  I started writing memoir in my teens. I wrote for a book series called Chicken Soup for the Soul, which was a very big in the 90s. I wrote for The Teenage Soul. I submitted a story in middle school. It was published and then they had me submit more pieces. I was writing about my personal life, so all my heartbreaks ended up in books. Everything that's ever happened to me that's been painful has been written about and publicly displayed for my whole life.
 
KARIN:  What have you learned about boundaries, if anything?
 
REBECCA:  My job is a litmus test for the people who are and aren't in my life anymore. When your job is to write about your personal life, you are a liability to the people who love you. There are people who have been with me for their whole lives, and my kids are very used to it, but yeah, that's definitely a question. It's like, where are the boundaries?
 
But that's how I started, as a blogger in 2001. I didn't go to college. I went straight to work for The Teenage Soul series at 18. I wrote, edited, and ghost wrote pretty much the entirety of three different books. It was just me under 15 different names.
 
KARIN:  Wow, really?
 
REBECCA:  They needed content and they didn't want it to seem like it was one person writing a whole book. Those books, by the way, make 10s of millions of dollars and contributors made $200. It was my job to go through submissions for years, and basically my boss ended up saying, I like the way you write better. So, I would just write stuff under different names. I had a whole series of a teenage boy and a teenage girl writing back and forth to each other, and I was both of them. I was writing about my personal stories under my name. That was nonfiction. But I was writing under pseudonyms about other issues. And that was fiction.
 
KARIN:  How did your writing career evolve from there?
 
REBECCA:  I started my blog Girl’s Gone Child in 2005, a few months after my son was born. I got pregnant unexpectedly at 23 with a person that I barely knew, married in Vegas, and suddenly went from being this single partying, traveling person to a married mother with a child in Los Angeles. None of my friends were nowhere near having kids.
 
I started my blog as a way of hopefully finding my people, or if not, just talking about my experience. Anytime I feel alone or isolated or like there's nobody who understands me, I write about it, because when you do that you actually find people who do. That's always been my bat signal to the world—writing about my discomfort or loneliness.
 
Shame keeps a lot of people from writing. One of my first stories was called I Kiss Like A Horse, which I wrote for Chicken Soup based on the fact this boy who I had kissed in 10th grade told everyone that I kissed like a horse. Not only did that rumor mortify me as a 14 or 15-year-old, but what I did was, I wrote an entire essay about it that was published in 15 different languages worldwide. So, I took a moment that would have otherwise been mortifying, and I said to myself, This makes me feel like shit, which means it's going to help someone else. That has been the heart of my work my whole life.
 
KARIN:  What a great way to deal with shame. What was your angle?
 
REBECCA:  It lands with this acceptance of having no control over what people say about me. I know who I am. And if I kiss like a horse, I'm going to wear it with pride.
 
KARIN:  What was it like being a blogger in the early 2000s?
 
REBECCA:  The internet was very punk rock at that time. It felt like you were making an online zine. We all did our own HTML. There was no such thing as algorithms. We embedded videos that we took on our digital cameras, that we edited ourselves. It was very DIY, so growing an audience felt really organic.
 
I was fortunate to be one of the first mommy bloggers and amassed a pretty large audience pretty quickly. From there, I got a book deal and launched Babel, which was a big parenting site in the mid to late aughts. They launched with three bloggers, and I was one of them. I was at the forefront of all the parenting writing spaces, so I was doing work for any parenting site that launched. If it wasn't contributing as a columnist or an essayist, it was consulting.
 
The ad guys realized there was a lot of money to be made from the mommy bloggers. I started making really good money.
 
KARIN:  How did that work exactly?
 
REBECCA:  It started with banner ads, and then it went to sponsored posts. You would get, say, a retainer with Target.
 
KARIN:  Were you transparent with your audience?
 
REBECCA:  In those days, everyone was. I don't think people are as transparent as they used to be. It was a big deal. You had to put on top of every post, “This is sponsored by Graco,” or whatever.
 
KARIN:  How did you manage working while raising four kids?
 
REBECCA:  Yeah, I had help. I had a nanny when my twins were little for the first few years. With my other kids, it was basically just me at home with a kid on my lap, figuring it out. I had sitters coming here and there when I needed them. I was super transparent about that, too. I think it was far more transparent those days than it is now. I don't think people talk about that.
 
KARIN:  What was the turning point?
 
REBECCA:  The money dried up, because the money started going to influencers. I'm not going to do Tik Tok videos. No dig on people who do that, it’s just, I was a writer.
 
I don't know a single person who was blogging long-form in the early aughts, who turned into an influencer of any kind. Nobody.
 
That's why Substack is exciting, because it's a return to the original space, which was writers writing and people reading our work because we were good writers. We weren't just writing pithy captions. It was really about storytelling and transparency and being honest about experiences. Not this hyper glossy, super filtered stuff.
 
On Substack I can charge people. It's $7 a month. I will publish some for free, but I'm going to publish anything that's explicit or super personal behind a paywall. You can't comment unless you are subscribed. That feels good to me. I’ve subscribed to a bunch of writers and I pay for all of the ones I subscribed to because I want to support people.
 
The return to these longer-form platforms is exciting because it means the work is going to start to speak for itself, and it's not about where you're publishing or how many followers you have, this bullshit that everyone's trying to sell you.
 
This Twitter thing is so interesting to me. It's like watching this thing fall—the hubris of male mediocrity who somehow became empowered. It's like eating popcorn.
 
KARIN:  Let’s talk about your memoir All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire. I find your voice and writing style so accessible. I really enjoy the way you move back and forth, in time and place, with digestible pieces that are seamlessly woven.
 
REBECCA:  Thank you.
 
KARIN:  How did you figure that out?
 
REBECCA:  The name of my Substack is “The Braid,” which was the way I looked at this book. I didn’t know this, but traditional story structure is based on a male orgasm. The climax and the resolution are huge.
 
It broke open my brain because that’s every story I've ever read. It’s the structure that I've been taught. My whole life is based on that shit, and of course I can't write my book like that. That's not how how I cum. I just kind of fall asleep. 
 
So, I had this epiphany about my own desire, my own body, and storytelling as a woman. How was I going to tell a story as a woman? What would my format look like? There isn't a climax and a resolution. That is not how my life looks. Is that honest? Whenever something happens, we're looking for the resolution. We're looking for the ‘aha’ moment. We're trying to find this device that, by the way, was created by some dude who said, This is is how I orgasm.
 
I remember my editor coming back and saying, I think this is your ending. I said, No, I don't think so. In fact, the first draft had three different endings like Choose Your Own Adventure—this idea that there are multiple climaxes and that just because I have one doesn't mean I'm done. I'm like, Wait, I can have another one, like I can still go, I'm not tired yet. That to me felt accurate to my experience, as a person, as a woman, as a sexual being at this point in my life. I'm not here for one ending. I'm not here for one climax. I'm here for all of them.
 
So, I had this come to Jesus moment about how I was going to format my book. What I kept coming back to was the braid—what the braid looked like and what it represented for me. 
 
The story that I wanted to tell does have three parts—the beginning, middle and end—that's legit. There are three parts, but they overlap with each other. The end is its own thing, too. It's the loose hairs of the braid that fall down the back.
 
It's a memoir. I don't know how you tie up loose ends. There is no end. You're still here, life is still happening. So, this idea of having to punctuate your ending feels really false. I'm really aware of endings and making sure that they're open and loose. That to me feels authentic.
 
KARIN:  I’m a fan of the braided structure and weaving the different story threads.
 
REBECCA:  I don't know if you've read Carmen Maria Machado. If you haven't, she's an incredible writer who wrote the memoir In the Dream House. I highly recommend it because you've never read anything like it. It’s basically told in little vignettes.
 
It feels like you're going through drawers, opening them up and seeing what's inside and closing them. I realized how rare it is to pick up a book and to recognize that its format is something you've never felt before—to be inspired not only by what you're reading but also by the way it's formatted. It's like, Oh my god, I can write a book like this. We get so bogged down by rules, and when you read someone who's breaking them all and killing it, it feels really exciting.
 
KARIN:  What was your writing process like?
 
REBECCA:  My process was super messy. I probably wrote the bulk of this book on my kitchen floor and on my notes app. I don't know what it is about the kitchen floor. I pretty much wrote it all in real time.
 
My book is about when my husband was diagnosed with stage four cancer, right after I told him that I wanted to divorce. He died four months later. So, I spent four months taking care of a man that I wanted to leave, and when he died, I felt a lot of conflicting feelings including relief because I was miserable in my marriage. But as a widow, I felt like I couldn't talk openly about that. I felt guilty for even feeling those things.
 
When I started this book, I basically went through my notes app and emailed myself every single one and put it all in a document. There were a lot of fragments, and I was trying to put together a mosaic based on all these little pieces. It was as if I had written hundreds of short essays.
 
The first draft of this book was twice as long as the published version. When I turned my book in to my editor, it read 800 pages. 110,000 words. She responded with, Your contract is for 65,000 words. I turned in a book that literally needed to be cut in half. I remember talking to her on the phone. I was in the parking lot at Trader Joe's and just burst into tears, because I was like, Oh my god, how the fuck am I going to cut this in half? I did cut half of it. I really stand by what remains, because I basically had to Sophie's Choice my whole book.
 
I'm glad that I didn't read the contract, because I think it made me a better writer. I think that so much of writing is editing.
 
KARIN:  How did people in your life react to your book?
 
REBECCA:  When you have people in your life that love you and support you unconditionally, you can write about anything. If you're writing a memoir, you are going to hurt people, but it is not on you to protect them from your truth.
 
I recently had another epiphany about the locked diary. Who does the locked diary protect? I grew up in the 80s as a small child and every one of my friends was given locked diaries—all the girls. My brother never got a locked diary. At the time it was like, yeah, you lock the diary. Keep your secrets safe.
 
I'm wondering more and more about this idea of secrecy. Who are we protecting? Who are we keeping safe?
 
I don't write to protect people from my truth. If you have a problem with it, if it's upsetting to you, or if you don't agree with me, that's not my problem. I've spent a lot of years protecting people, mainly men, and I don't need to do that anymore.
 
You have to be not only prepared but also welcoming to every feeling, from every person, and validating all of it. I have reached out to everyone in my family—they knew I was writing this book—saying, I understand if this is going to be hard for you. If you don't want to talk to me, if you feel uncomfortable, I validate your feelings. I love you. I have to write this book.
 
Allowing people to react negatively and giving them the space to do that and have those feelings is really important, because they're entitled to their feelings as much as you're entitled to your truth. They're entitled to the reaction to your work as much as you're entitled to doing the work.
 
KARIN:  I noticed that you use the royal “we” in your writing, as if including the reader in your experience. Are you aware of that?
 
REBECCA:  I've been writing for 20 years, and a lot of the people who were with me 20 years ago still are, and we're still having these conversations behind the scenes. The “we” feels inclusive to those who aren't able to articulate their stories or don't feel like they can talk openly about their experiences. I feel like I'm speaking for them.
 
Through writing this book, I found out a huge secret about two very close women in my family. Both of them shared these major, life-changing secrets with me, and I realized, Oh, I carry their stories in my body. I come from these women, they're in my body.
 
So much of my willingness to write about what I wrote about was informed by the fact that I was carrying the secrets of these women in my body and that they trusted me with those secrets. As much as I was writing for me, I was writing for them too. I'm not trying to sound like a martyr hero, it's just that when we are sitting down to write our truth, we're not just writing it for us. Otherwise we would be writing it in our notebook and not sharing it with anybody. There's something in us that recognizes that our story is going to be relatable and helpful. A love letter to somebody else. 
 
So I think the “we” is acknowledging that there are people on the other side of your work who are going to see you and feel seen by what you're saying. So much of memoir writing is this gift to some relationship, like you're sharing yourself with someone and it does feel like a “we” to me.



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To learn more about Rebecca Woolf visit her site.

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A Conversation with John Truby

I had the great honor of interviewing John Truby, a revered story consultant, legendary writing teacher, and author of the seminal book The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller, which guides writers towards constructing effective, multifaceted narratives.

His latest book The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works is another deep dive, this time into the study of genres. We talked specifically about the unique advantages and challenges of the memoir genre, and John gave some incredible insights about how blending memoir with another genre (can you guess which one?) can offer a brilliant solution.

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John Truby is the founder and director of Truby’s Writers Studio. Over the past thirty years, he has taught more than fifty thousand students worldwide, including novelists, screenwriters, and TV writers. Together, these writers have generated more than fifteen billion dollars at the box office.

Based on the lessons in his award-winning class, Great Screenwriting, his book The Anatomy of Story draws on a broad range of philosophy and mythology, offering fresh techniques and insightful anecdotes alongside Truby's own unique approach for how to build an effective, multifaceted narrative.

Just as The Anatomy of Story changed the way writers develop stories, The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works will enhance their quality and expand the impact they have on the world.

The Anatomy of Genres is a step-by-step guide to understanding and using the basic building blocks of the story world. He details the three ironclad rules of successful genre writing, and analyzes more than a dozen major genres and the essential plot events, or “beats,” that define each of them.

Simply put, the storytelling game is won by mastering the structure of genres.

KARIN GUTMAN: In your book The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works, you say that everything we've been told about story is actually the opposite in reality. What do you mean by that?
 
JOHN TRUBY: We think about stories as entertainment, as what we do at the end of our day to escape reality. It's actually the opposite. Stories are first. Story is not a luxury, it is the reality itself.
 
Story heightens reality, so that we can see the deeper patterns underneath. Just as there is a deep structure to a story, there is the deeper structure to the reality that we live in, and what stories do at their best is show us that deeper structure in our lives, so that we can control it, we can work with it, we can do what we need to do to make it better.
 
It's why the first chapter is titled “The World as Story.” We don't just tell stories, we are stories. That begins with the very first story that we become when we're born. We go through story stages that I talk about in my first book, The Anatomy of Story, which are the seven basic story structure steps. The first step is weakness/need, and the second is desire.
 
As soon as we're born, we have that weakness/need, which is we've got to have some food and mother's milk is the desire line. That's the goal. As we get a little bit older, we start to distinguish other characters in the story besides me, the hero, and we realize some of those people are allies and some of those people are opponents who are preventing us from getting our goals.
 
Story tells us how the world works, and it tells us how to live successfully in the world. Genres, as different types of stories, offer us different windows into the world. Each genre gives a different understanding of how the world works. It gives us a moral vision, or a different life philosophy, for how to live a successful life.
 
I start off each chapter talking about what these life philosophies are and how they differ from what we think about these genres.
 
KARIN: Can you share some of the life philosophies?
 
JOHN: Sure, some examples are:
 
·       MYTH represents a journey to understand oneself and gain immortality. In other words, myth is all about immortality. If you can't get it in the afterlife, is it possible to get some kind of immortality in the life we live here?
 
·       MEMOIR is not about the past, it's about creating your future. When I say that to people, it's always a big moment, because Oh no, memoir is the most past oriented of those story forms. In a certain way it is, but that's not the purpose of it. The purpose is about changing our future in a very deep and meaningful way.
 
·       FANTASY is about finding the magic in the world and in ourselves, so that we can turn life into art, and so we can make our own lives a work of art.
 
·       DETECTIVE FICTION shows us how to think successfully by comparing different stories to learn what is true.
 
·       And finally LOVE STORIES, which I talk about as the highest of all the genres. Love stories reveal that happiness comes from mastering the moral act of loving another person.
 
KARIN: Why is the study of genres so important for storytellers?
 
JOHN: First of all, as writers we need to know what the plot beats are in these genres that we're writing. Because if you don't have that, you're not even in the game. But that's really only the beginning, that's the first step.
 
What's really valuable about the genres, and what is really the key to getting the most out of them and affecting the reader, is to be able to express the life philosophy that each genre has embedded inside the plot. That aspect of theme is the thing that most writers don't get. I consider the theme to be the most misunderstood of all the major writing skills. The only thing writers know is that you don't want to preach to the audience. You don't want to write on the nose, and so they avoid it altogether. And what they've just done is given up the most powerful aspect of a story, in terms of affecting the audience, that you have.
 
KARIN: How do you define theme?
 
JOHN: I define theme differently than most people. The usual definition of theme is subject matter; for example, it might be racism. That is a subject to me.
 
Theme is the moral vision of the author. It is a view of how to live successfully in this world with other people. How do we get our desires without hurting or destroying others? Oftentimes when people hear this definition of theme, they think, Oh, you're preaching to the audience. Not at all, it’s the reverse of that. You express that through the characters, as the hero and the opponent compete over the same goal. Both of those characters should have moral flaws, and in the act of competition we explore the deeper moral issues of what each is going through to try to get what they want in this life.
 
KARIN: I love that you say “memoir is not about the past, but creating the future.” Can you offer some perspective on memoir as a genre?
 
JOHN: Sure. For each genre I list, what I call, the life story that the genre is really about at the deepest level.
 
So for Horror, the deeper life story is religion. Action is really about success. Myth tracks the life process that anyone would go through over their entire lifespan.
 
Memoir and Coming of Age—I put them in the same chapter for a reason—are about creating the self. So, memoir is very deep. The difference is that memoir is about creating the self through nonfiction techniques, while the Coming of Age story is about creating the self through fiction techniques. But they're doing the same thing.
 
Memoir is brilliant at allowing us to look back at our entire life—we're able to pull out what is unique and valuable, what makes us a unique individual. It's already been shaped quite a bit as we've lived our life, but the act of telling our memoir refines that to a much greater degree because now we can see the larger patterns, the deeper structures that have been hidden from us. Oftentimes what we track is the script that may have been formed from a very early age. Maybe it worked for us to solve the problems at that age, but we're much older than that now and there's a good chance that that script does not work to solve those problems. It actually is part of the problem. And so, memoir gives us this big picture view of our life, and then that allows us to be able to make choices going forward, into the future, to create the rest of our lives in a way that is much more beneficial to us and to be the person that we want to be.
 
KARIN:  You say that some people tend to get caught up in the tropes of a particular genre. What do you mean by that?
 
JOHN: It's one of the biggest misconceptions that writers currently have. They think they know the value of these tropes, these individual story beats, but they think about them individually. They say, “Well, I'll grab this trope and that trope,” and it can be a character type, it can be a plot beat, it can be a symbol, it can be a tagline. “I'll grab these different tropes and put them together in my story.”
 
No, it doesn't work that way. The difference between trope and genre is the difference between an individual beat and an entire story system. By that I mean it's a plot system where the beats have been worked out and in the right order. When I say ‘right order’ that doesn't mean you have to do them in that order. But they've been worked out over decades and sometimes centuries to give us the most dramatic version of that genre that we can get. It is the sequence of these individual beats that really gives us the powerful effect of genre.
 
If you're thinking in terms of tropes, you're getting about 1/10 of the true power of your own storytelling ability. You're not even scratching the surface.
 
In fact, the first requirement of a writer, in whatever genre you're working in, is to know what those beats are and their basic order. There's typically 15 to 20 in each genre. Once you know that, then it's your job to transcend the genre. Transcending is how you do a story form in a way that no one else has done it. It's the way you stand out and separate yourself from the crowd.
 
KARIN: With memoir, you say that the genre itself is transcendent.
 
JOHN: That is correct, because transcending the genre, in broad terms, is about getting into the deep theme of that form. Memoir is about the deep theme in every single beat. It's automatically about that. It's the most explicitly thematic of all the genres and that is both a strength and a weakness. It's a strength because it means the most powerful of all elements of storytelling—expressing the theme of how to live—is part of your story. Even without you doing anything, it's going to be there. The negative part is that it can be preachy and on the nose, and you have to be very careful about that.
 
KARIN: Can you talk about the first story beat—weakness/need—as it pertains to memoir?
 
JOHN:  It's the first of the seven major structure steps in every one of the genres that I talk about.
 
Weakness has to do with the internal flaw that is so severe that it is ruining the hero's life. In Anatomy of Story I describe two major types of this flaw. One is psychological. This is a flaw that is hurting the hero but no one else. The other type is a moral flaw. That is, the hero is hurting other people. Typically, it's because they don't understand their psychological flaw, and therefore they lash out and say, I can't figure out what's hurting me, so I'm going to make you pay for it. So, it has negative ramifications for others. The need then of that character is to overcome that flaw, or flaws, by the end of the story.
 
Writers tend to think of the word ‘need’ in a negative way. It's actually positive. It's what the character needs to do to fix their life by the end of the story. What the story is really about is solving that internal flaw and if you don't solve it, you fail as a storyteller.
 
KARIN: How does this relate specifically to memoir?
 
JOHN: Since memoir often focuses on childhood, this can be problematic for writers. For one, the younger the character is, the less able you are as the writer to establish a moral flaw, because kids can do things that hurt people, but then aren’t responsible for it because they're completely unaware and have no control over that. So that limits what you can do in terms of setting up what the character needs to fix.
 
The other problem is that the main opponent is usually a family member, where the imbalance of power between the child and the parents is so great. It makes the hero a victim, and it makes the parents come across as evil opponents. You never want to tell a story where the hero is a victim. Typically, the weakness/need of the child in a memoir is simply that they don't understand. The parents are doing things that are hurtful to them. It leads to a passive hero, which is why I say in the memoir chapter to always look for both a moral as well as a psychological flaw for this character that can play out over the course of the story.
 
To be a moral flaw, it's got to be an internal flaw that is explicitly hurting at least one other person in the story. Otherwise, it's strictly psychological. Memoir is especially strong in the psychological flaw area. They're very focused on that. But again, for various reasons, they typically are not as good at setting up the moral flaw of the individual. Instead, they give the moral flaw to the opponents in the story.
 
KARIN:  What would you recommend? That they grow into the moral flaw?
 
JOHN: Exactly. The older they get, the more responsibility they get, and the more they are responsible for any hurt they inflict on others. It's also quite realistic. So, in solving the story problem, you're also matching reality, which is that a child may start with strictly a psychological flaw, but at some point, they're going to become an adult and at some point, they've got to take responsibility.
 
KARIN: With regard to the antagonist of a story, memoir writers often feel like they are their own antagonist. From your perspective, isn’t it also important to have an external opponent?
 
JOHN: Yes. I hear this all the time. Writers say, “Well, my opponent is myself.” Well, that's good. That's the weakness/need, the first structure step. Every good character and story have an internal opponent. You also have to have at least one external opponent. And if you want plot, you need to have more than one. It’s that simple.
 
The best stories attack from outside and they attack from inside.
 
KARIN: You write that point of view in memoir doesn't simply show what happened, it's a different way of sequencing time. What do you mean by that?
 
JOHN: Let's be honest, there are large chunks of your life that aren't dramatically interesting. And yet, a story is about the most dramatic beats of your life, or of that particular story. So you run into a problem, which is: how do I tell a story that hits the seven major structure steps, which are the seven steps required for any good story? It's why so many memoirs use the storytelling frame, which is a way of sequencing the story where you typically start at the end point of the story. You start at the end of the battle scene that creates a trigger for the author to say, how did I get here? How did this happen?
 
That triggers them to go back, into the past, which is where we establish the weakness/need of that character, and then we sequence the plot going forward.
 
KARIN: I think Mary Karr refers to this approach to structure as a “flash forward” in her book The Art of Memoir.
 
JOHN: Yeah, there are different names for it.
 
Now, why is that so valuable? It's because as soon as you are in the mind of a character who's telling you a story, it gives you tremendous freedom with the reader to say, “I am going to tell this story, not necessarily in chronological order. I'm going to tell it any way I want, because I'm in my head.” And the mind goes all over the place. It gives you a lot of benefits, which includes taking out all those boring time periods. It densifies the story, it compacts the story, it makes it much more dramatic, and it makes it much more appealing to the reader.
 
It allows you to revisit time in the sequence that you want. Normally it’s chronological, but it's curated chronological. It's the most important chronological moments. But it doesn't even have to be that. Once you're in point of view, I can start off with, Okay, this is something that happened 30 years ago, but then that reminds me of something that happened just last year, but they're related. So, I'm going to talk about that now, and so on and so forth. It gives you a better plot.
 
It also gives you much more of an emotional identification with that character. So, the use of the storyteller frame gives you tremendous advantages when doing a memoir, in terms of solving the unique problems that memoir poses for writers.
 
KARIN: You say that most stories are a combination of two to four genres, and I'm wondering what memoir can be blended with? You mentioned that the Detective genre is a good match.
 
JOHN: It's important for all genres because in terms of selling the work, in terms of it being popular, this gives readers two for the price of one. In the same length, you're giving the viewer twice to three times the plot that they would normally get. It just so happens that over the last 30 years or so, plot, in every medium has become more dense. This is the reality that we live in as storytellers.
 
When you're doing fiction story forms, there are almost infinite permutations of what you can mix and match. Again, memoir poses certain specialized problems. If you talk to most people who are not writers, and don't really know how the sausage is made, they think memoir has got to be the easiest thing to write. Because all you do is just remember what happened in your life. You just put those events in sequence and you’ve got your story. Right? Totally wrong. It is one of the most difficult forms to write.
 
Its greatest challenge is plot for various reasons. One is that you're covering a lot of time where there's not dramatic events happening. Another is that the life you led may not be as exciting as a detective story where you're trying to find out who killed someone, or an action story where somebody is fighting somebody else. Those other genres are souped-up plots. That's what genres are for, that's why they were invented, to give you maximum plot.
 
With memoir, we're talking about real events. It gives us real power emotionally, because we know those events really happened to that writer. But it gives us great challenge of plot. So, this is where mixing genres become so valuable for the memoir writer and why it is typically combined with detective story, using that storytelling frame we just talked about. When the writer triggers back to what happened, they become a detective and are looking for clues. It allows you to sequence the plot based on a sequence of clues and a sequence of reveals. Reveals are the keys to plot. The more reveals you have, the better the plot is. So, by making the writer the detective of their own life, you're getting the power of memoir, which is essentially the power of personal drama. You gain that advantage. But you're also getting the advantage of the plot of the detective form. And it turns out, the detective is the most dense and complex plot of any genre. It's a marriage made in heaven. If you are the memoir writer, it gives you a solution to so many problems that you're going to have to solve.
 
KARIN: I love that. That’s a brilliant insight.
 


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A Conversation with Erin Khar

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!

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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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