A Conversation with Kelly Carlin

I had the great pleasure of speaking with Kelly Carlin last week about her memoir release, A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up With George, published by St. Martin's Press in September. She has been running around doing all sorts of interviews and publicity for the book, but took the time here to share some insights about her creative process and how she discovered her own techniques for writing the more challenging and painful parts of her story. She also had some wise and enlightening thoughts on why women in particular are coming together in creative spaces to write and share their personal stories.

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Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1963,  KELLY CARLIN grew up watching her father, George Carlin, become a counter-culture hero with his comedy. As a child, Kelly explored her own creativity by writing skits and doing imitations (her Ethel Merman was quite good for an eight year old). She began her professional life in her teens working behind the scenes with her mother, Brenda, on various shows for HBO that continued into her twenties.

In 1993, at the ripe age of 30, she graduated from UCLA, Magna Cum Laude, with a B.A. in Communications Studies. While at UCLA, Kelly discovered her voice as a writer, which led her to a career in writing for film and TV with her husband Robert McCall.

After her mother's death in 1997, Kelly found her true calling - autobiographical storytelling- through her first one-woman show, “Driven To Distraction.” In 2001, Kelly stepped away from the entertainment business to pursue her masters in Jungian Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate institute. She studied mythology, Jungian psychology and the intersection of art and the sacred.

Kelly is a speaker, hosts The Kelly Carlin Show on SiriusXM, and "Waking from the American Dream" on SModcast Network, and has been touring her present one-woman show, “A Carlin Home Companion,” since 2011.  Her memoir, A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up With George, was published by St. Martin's Press in September 2015. 

Karin: Could you start by sharing in your own words how you would describe your memoir, “A Carlin Home Companion?”

Kelly: Oh yeah absolutely.  And I love that phrase “in your own words.”  My dad made fun of that once; like “who's words would I possibly be using?” is his response. It's such a great little thing in speech that we do that we don't even think about.

So this book for me was really put into motion by my desire to share what they say in AA, “My experience, strength and hope.”  I went through so much in my life and ended up on my feet, and with a sense of myself and some wisdom. And I really wanted a chance to share that and to give people who might be stuck in some of these similar situations a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel to walk through.  So that's really the impetus of where it came from.

And then since my dad died, what also has come up for me is to be able to share aspects of my father that he never shared with his fans so that people could get a real idea of the whole human being that he was; the father, the husband, the artist and the man. And then of course the dance we did; the father-daughter dance we did, putting aside my mother for a moment, around me finding my own power and strength and voice. And the dance I did in relationship to him and his career and his personality and my own expectations; I really wanted to share that, too.

How did you go about balancing his story versus your story? When you talk about it now it just seems so clear. Was it always that easy to distinguish?

I've been privileged to have had done some real work around this stuff because four-and-a-half years ago I began developing a solo show with the same title. And Paul Provenza, my director, helped me a lot; really us just trying to find the clear narrative. Now in the solo show, we do focus on my father a lot in the first half and I played videos of my dad's career. So he's on-stage in video form and then I'm telling family stories around those different eras. As the show progresses, less and less of the George Carlin shows up and more and more of my story shows up, which is somewhat similar in my book. My book's structured a bit differently, but what I've come to tell people about my solo show is people come for the George and they stay for the Kelly. So I have some experience around balancing these two narratives.  

But I knew I wanted this book to be my book and my editor wanted it to be my book. The fact that it's Carlin and there's a picture of me and my dad on the cover, yes that gets you more attention in a world of books where there are thousands of titles a year. To find a little niche on a bookshelf somewhere is important and to catch someone's eye is important, but it's not a biography of my dad.

I knew that this was my story. I knew that I would tell it from first a daughter's perspective, a child's perspective, and then adolescence, teen and then my twenties and then a maturing adult.

Actually when my dad's autobiography came out, we posthumously published it. It's called Last Words and it was really based on taped conversations with Tony Hendra who was a friend of my dad's and a great writer in his own right. And when I got the galley and there was a chapter on my mother, there was a chapter on some other different people in my dad's life and there was no chapter on me, I was heartbroken. I thought that my dad hadn't even talked about me. I was really confused. And Tony even said to me at that time, “I decided not to put a chapter in there of you because you have such a rich story to tell in your own right and I wanted people to be curious enough so that when your book does come out there would be a real hunger for it.”

Wow, that's great motivation, and endorsement.

Totally. And that's when I knew; it was like, “Oh yeah I do have a great story to tell and even Tony Hendra believes that.” So yeah that was part of my motivation.

During the process of writing the book, did you ever struggle with him upstaging it?

It's always been a delicate balance, and I spent a lot of my years defining myself up against my father and still do. I mean it's just a natural part of what happens. I think having the book out now I feel very relieved because it's done. It's like my story with my dad is done, you know? In reality it's about our whole family; my mother is a huge part of the story too. So it's really about a family struggling through some things and how we all end up healing each other as well as we can. And we're all humans; we don't heal perfectly. But the reality was, I knew what my narrative was; I knew where I wanted to end up, which is who I am today. The scaffolding of my solo show helped me with this a bit; I had to go back to really decide what do I put in?  And I had to put in the things about me where I was giving myself away. So a lot of my story is about giving myself away and living through my dad's shadow and having no sense of self and fighting for it and discovering it and finding my way.  

So it's all in there; the part of being stuck in the shadow and the part coming out of it. But I was really, really lucky that I had a publisher and an editor that said to me, “This is your story.” I don't think I would have signed up for anything else.

Does it feel exposing?

It feels a little weird at times, but as my friend Sara Benincasa reminded me the night before my book was published and I was absolutely freaking out, no matter what “I” in your memoir is a character and that every person in you memoir is a character and you are not that person and you are not your book and that it is after all a constructed reality like everything else is in our lives. And that really helped me. Yeah of course there are particulars out there, but I know that I shared those particulars because they were pertinent to my story and what obstacles I needed to overcome and how I overcame them. But I've always been a person strangely enough who's felt more comfortable telling a room full of strangers my secrets than sitting among my dad or my mother. That's part of our story in the Carlin family. Here my dad was this great truth teller on stage and yet because of the nature of the dysfunction and the alcoholism and the drug addiction we were all in denial all the time and we were all pretending. We were all really good at pretending everything was okay and just the irony of that. So that was my training in some ways. It's very strange.

Did it really make a difference that it was published after your dad had passed away?

For me yeah, absolutely.

In what way?

I've had freedom. I feel a real freedom. I think people who have parents who died understand the freedom that comes with that. Even if your parents are not famous and even if you're not looking to tell your story out in the world, there's something that happens. Obviously there's grief and loss; that is very real and very deep, but at the same time there's a little more space for a person on earth without your parents there. Part of the work to do after a parent's death is not only to understand that they are physically gone from your life and they're not there to kind of watch over your shoulder, but that whatever you have internalized about them whether real or not your job then is to get right with that internalized version of them, too. Because if it's an internalized negative version of them, their negative voice is still going to haunt you and it has nothing to do with the person; it's the thing that you've internalized. It's your inner work to do. So even after my mom died and then even after my dad died, I had work to do around that kind of stuff to really get into a right relationship with them and own up that the negative voice in my head from my dad even when he was alive which thought that, “Oh he's not going to like it if I write about this or I tell about this,” might have been true on some levels, but that was really my negative voice that I'd put on him. So it was just easier for me for him not to be here with me to do that work because of his fame and his place in the culture. He's such a force of reason and wisdom and truth-telling and all of that - that that was a lot for me to compete with while he was here.

If you were to point to the most challenging aspect of writing this book, what was it for you?

I think it was having to slow down enough to go into some traumatic themes in my life and to slow down enough so that I could articulate them as a writer so that the audience and the reader could really live it with me. And therefore then having to go into the pain of my past and re-live it, not just as a witness narrator but as a person living it in order to really be able to use language to describe what it feels like to be in the room with a person when your mother's angry and drunk. Or you're in the room with your abusive boyfriend; you're not sure what's going to happen kind of a moment. And really having to slow down and feel those things again and realize that, “Ah, ugh,” you know? So those were hard moments to do and not fun chapters to have to dig into, but I found a way certainly to do that and was lucky to have some kinds of exercises I could do that helped me do it in a way that was safe.

Can you share those exercises?

Yeah, one of which is an NLP exercise, which stands for Neuro-linguistic Programming. And what it is, is you do a visualization of yourself and become a witness to yourself, as if you're looking at your life and you figure out which direction is future and past for you. For me, my future is forward and my past is back; some people it's left and right. It changes for whatever your wiring is. And so you see your future laid out in front of you, you see your past laid out behind you, and you turn around and you go into your past. And I would go into my past and see the numbers, the years ticking off.  And so whatever event I was writing about, say it was my mother's alcoholism when she was really, really sick with it, you go back to a time before you were affected by the trauma and you're trauma free. And so it's not in your body and you connect to that feeling in your body as being trauma-free and then you take an angled trip down into this traumatic scene you want to be witnessing. So I did that and I was able to go into our family's home where we lived up in Tellem Drive in the Palisades where both my parents were crazy on drugs and alcohol and my mother almost died from alcoholism; it was like the darkest years of the Carlin life. And I was able to walk around the house trauma-free and go into every single room and remember all the furniture, where everything was. I mean it was absolutely an incredible experience of memory. And that allowed me then to feel safe enough in that space to go and find my alcoholic drunk mother in a room.

Wow.

Yeah. And then be able to really let the little girl be there with her and be able to write about what that feels like; what that feels like, what's in the air. So I wasn't re-traumatizing myself by doing it some other way. And it was a really effective tool for me.

No one had ever recommended doing it that way.  I just decided, “Well I'm going to try this,” because I knew I had to go back in this house and I was resisting writing that chapter. I was like, “Aggghhh! Who wants to fucking write about this shit,” you know? Because really all of your resistance comes up in your body and it's healthy and smart because it's trying to protect you. And so I kind of figured out this little mind game to do.

Thanks for sharing that.

As you know, I have been offering memoir workshops for a few years now, and I've been struck by how the participants are nearly all female. I know you feel strongly that there is a larger cultural shift going on in the 21st century around women owning and telling their stories. Can you speak to that?

Yeah sure. I think women, especially our mothers and our grandmothers and then all the way through the mother lines, haven't been part of the grander narrative of civilization. We play supporting roles; we play roles behind the scenes. Essential roles, I mean Jesus Christ we birth the babies. And through the millennia we supported the men who were the warriors and the leaders and the business tycoons and all that kind of stuff. Not saying that there weren't important women in history certainly, but history was written by men and therefore our stories have not been accessible to us. And so I think even we don't feel like we have stories. And so I really believe, especially in this Oprah-age, you know Oprah was one of the first women on TV in the mainstream media to start giving us a voice about our internal lives and what we're living and empowering women to come forward and tell their stories. I think about Phil Donahue also; he was doing that, too. But that was really the beginning of it.

There is this claiming; so much I hear women saying the phrase finding my voice. “I want to find my voice. I want to live my authentic life. I don't feel like I can express all of myself.” And I think this just comes from these unspoken, unseen, invisible rules of our culture, even though it is 2015 and we have come a long way baby, as they say. When you think about the full scope of human history, this is just the beginning of women finding their voices. I mean it's been a hundred years since women got the vote in this country, so it's not a long time. And so I think women are in great need to connect to other people's stories, to find a room safe enough to tell our stories. Virginia Woolf is the one who talked about a room of our own, that you have to feel safe in order to come out and tell these stories. Not only have we not been allowed to tell our stories, but that when we do come forward to tell our stories, we're then defined by the mainstream culture and we're seen as whatever; too emotional or too this or too that or whatever it is. But this is all changing and it's really actually an amazing, kind of a golden age for women.

Most of the heroes in our mythology and comic books and the media are these kind of male versions of heroes. But how heroic is it for a mother who will do anything to protect her children? Or the sacrifice that women have made in order to keep the world spinning forward? These are just as heroic.  

I think it's really a unique time, so it doesn't surprise me that women are showing up in these rooms and wanting to do this work. Part of the reason I write is to understand myself, so it's not surprising that women are turning to writing classes to find out who they are and to figure out their own relationship with themselves and what they believe, and who are they in the world and in our culture.

To learn more about Kelly Carlin, visit thekellycarlinsite.com

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A Conversation with Leslie Lehr

In the summer Unlocking Your Story workshops we've been discussing the differences between fiction and nonfiction, and what each one offers as a form to share the story that you want to tell. For some writers it's an obvious inclination toward one or the other; for other writers, it's not so clear.

I had the great pleasure of talking in depth with prize-winning author, essayist and screenwriter Leslie Lehr about her point of view on this topic. As someone who writes both fiction and nonfiction, she shared openly about her own creative process and approach, which I found extremely thought-provoking. Leslie also teaches novel writing at UCLA Extension Writers' Program and is a story consultant for Truby Writers Studio. You can read the full interview below!

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Leslie Lehr is a prize-winning author, essayist and screenwriter. Her new novel, What A Mother Knows, follows Wife Goes On, 66 Laps, and three nonfiction books, including Welcome to Club Mom. Her essays appear in the New York Times, Huffington Post, and anthologies such as Mommy Wars. Leslie mentors writers through private consulting and Truby's Writers Studio. A graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts with an MFA from Antioch University, she is a member of PEN, The Authors Guild, WGA, Women In Film, The Women's Leadership Council of L.A., and is a contributor to the Tarcher/Penguin Series "Now Write."

Karin: You write both fiction and nonfiction. How would you describe the difference between the two?

Leslie: With fiction, like my new novel, What A Mother Knows, every single element is designed to express an emotional truth, so you design and funnel everything for that purpose. With memoir, you are limited to reality. You can expand and compress time or include some things and not others, but it's a tricky thing. It's still your point of view, but our memories are not always reliable, nor popular. Fiction offers a structure in which to include the things that are the most important to you. 

So would you say fiction is more structured or formulaic than memoir? 

Not formulaic in a bad way. The best memoirs have a frame, but you're still dealing with weighing personal experience with what you learned from it. In a novel you are forced to make things up around those ideas. You have to tell a story based on a person who has a need and a desire, strong opponents, a battle, a climax and a resolution - and more things that happen in between depending on what the genre is. It all springs from your theme but doesn't explain it. Writing a novel, the reader needs to know where the characters are all the time. You need to be the camera. And if a certain element doesn't work to tell your story, it shouldn't be there. Everything needs to be carefully designed.

In memoir, you can usually take more time with internal narrative. And you have to tell the truth even if it's just your side of the truth. You can't add stuff that happened to help make your point. That said, if you have something to say, you can say it in either form.

My dad is a scientist, and he doesn't read any fiction. We've discussed this often over the years. And I've written both. I've written three fiction books, three nonfiction, screenplays, and I do a lot of personal essays. My dad writes a lot of articles, but he thinks that fiction is make-believe. I have to tell him that nonfiction - even books on science and history - is according to the statistics of that day. History changes. It also tends to be one person's point of view. So if you're trying to tell a story about an emotional event or some reality, fiction is the way I like to do it. There is a real truth you can get to in fiction that you can't always get to in non-fiction.

There are benefits to both forms, but I am having the most fun with full-length fiction. And I do use fiction as a device to explore real life even beyond the entertainment or escape value. Currently, I'm working on the script for What A Mother Knows, which is truly puzzle-making, cutting so much while keeping the meaning intact. I'm also developing a new story, based on emotional and cultural truths that I want to express. I also do manuscript consultations for Truby Writers Studio using story structure techniques that enhance memoirs as well as novels.

If someone is debating between fiction and nonfiction to tell a certain story, is there a way that they can answer that question for themselves?

That's a personal choice. In fiction, stories are better told in particular genres. But when you want to tell a certain truth, either commit to transparency or wrap it in a fictional story.

Years before I wrote What A Mother Knows, I wrote a memoir that a family member objected to so much that I decided to hold off on publishing until it felt safe for everyone. Some writers feel comfortable even when others are not comfortable - I'm just not one. I think life is challenging enough than to ask for trouble, especially when I can deal with the same issues in fiction. And sure enough, a bit of it ended up in What A Mother Knows - the emotional truth of it, anyway.

The advantage of writing fiction is that you can make up things in order to tell a story in a way that can magnify the idea that you want to explore. On the other hand, you're in competition with people making up any story, and so it has to be really good and bigger than life and yet more intimate and precise, because you're trying to tell your story. So it's a decision that you, as the writer, have to make, and be 'all in' whichever you choose.

Last year a woman from the State Library of California read all of my work for an in depth interview at Literary Orange. She pointed out that most of my work begins with a personal essay then expands into a novel. So, without being conscious of it, I've been playing with the best of both worlds.

Is it true that you always know the ending to your stories when you begin?

I always figure you can't hit the bull's eye unless you can see the target. But that's just me. I know a lot of people who don't know the ending. If you know where you're going, then you're going to design a story that makes it all logical. You want the ending to be a surprise, but it has to be a logical surprise. You know how disappointing it can be when the butler did it? All the time we put in to watching or reading something and then there's no pay-off because something came out of the blue. It has to be really synthesized to work in a certain way. I'm not saying that everyone should have an ending and stick to it. The character's journey can inspire a writer to change the ending. For me it just helps to know where I'm going. Writing a novel takes a lot of time and a lot of passion. For me, caring that much about a story typically means caring that it gets to a particular ending.

In memoir, you might not know the ending when you begin, unless you are ten years hence and have built a strong story frame. The writing can be part of the journey to a deeper understanding. It's a process of finding that transcendent meaning; it's eureka. It's having those epiphanies. And it's often cathartic. That's why it's so important to keep a pad of paper by your bed, to write things down, because it's in there. And you may think you have the ending, and then four years later you find the real ending. But it's never really an ending because you're still alive and you've got other things going on, and maybe those experiences contribute to your understanding.

To learn more about Leslie Lehr, visit leslielehr.com

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A Conversation with Daniel Jones

How timely that the February 4th release of Daniel Jones's book Love Illuminated not only coincides with the 10-year anniversary of his renowned New York Times's “Modern Love” column, but also with the fêted Valentine's holiday. The book is a search to find the connections - the themes and trends - among the 50,000 stories that have crossed his desk over the years, and will no doubt offer some enlightening insights.

I had the pleasure of speaking with him last week about his new book, as well as his experience editing the ML column over the years. It was a treat to hear his perspective on everything from the rise of the personal essay to his own editing and creative writing process. You can read my full conversation with him below.

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Daniel Jones has edited the Modern Love column in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times since its inception in October 2004. His books include two essay anthologies, Modern Love and The Bastard on the Couch, and a novel, After Lucy, which was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. His writing has appeared in several publications, including the New York Times, Elle, Parade, Real Simple, and Redbook. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his wife, writer Cathi Hanauer, and their two children.

Karin: Tell me about your new book, Love Illuminated, and how it came to be.

Daniel Jones: This book was really a search for me to figure out what I knew, because I felt like I'd been doing this [Modern Love] column for years and years, and every once in a while I would sort of stand up and look around at what I'd done and what I'd read. I'd write, on an annual basis, an editor's observations column on Valentine's Day. I did that about five or six times. And I'd try to make sense in very few words - I think those columns were 1500 to 1700 words - of trends, and you know, entertaining asides. And I felt like I wanted to do that in a bigger way, and really try to understand what I'd learned about what people are doing and what's different. I didn't feel like I could do that unless I wrote a book. Because people would always ask me about it, and they would say, “You must be in a position where you ought to know something about this.” I felt like I was in that position, and I didn't know. So yeah, this book was to answer that.

It was a great experience, actually being able to see themes and how technology was changing relationships, what online dating was doing and how people who were having affairs were rationalizing them according to certain lines of argument. Those sorts of themes and trends started to emerge from the material, and that was a satisfying process.

How has the Modern Love column changed and evolved over ten years?

I think it has evolved in several ways. In the beginning we didn't quite know what the content of the column would be, other than it would be broadly about relationships. I remember we discussed what the name would be, and I was actually the one who suggested “Modern Love” and part of the intent was for it to be broad enough that we wouldn't be hemmed in just to romantic stories that were just about romantic love. I just worried about its longevity. How is this thing going to last if you limit the focus of what you're running essays on? So I interpreted that pretty broadly. At the beginning there was an eagerness about covering certain topics, and having a representative sample of experiences. It seemed wide open, but we wanted the column to represent a bunch of different things and get experiences out there that we thought people would want to read about and that would be eye-opening in one way or another. I wanted to shape readers' perceptions of what this column could be.

That has completely changed. I feel like so many different kinds of stories have run, there is a real freedom now in not feeling like I have to define the column anymore. People know what the range is now, and I feel that I can run things that are offbeat in one way or another or that barely fit under the umbrella of Modern Love, or as far as that umbrella can extend. If you have 12 essays and you're starting a column, those 12 essays are really important in terms of what you're saying. But if you have 500 essays, each one becomes less important in terms of how it's going to shift the perception of what you're doing. So that's a freedom. I feel I can just go after strong, varied material wherever it goes. And so many topics have been covered way beyond what I ever expected I could dream about getting.

Do you have a philosophy or opinion about why the personal essay and personal narrative in general has become so popular? It seems to be more than just a trend.

It's enduring, isn't it?

Young people are writing - people who are in college or in their 20s - with social media and blogging and all these phases that we've gone through. So much of it is about writing about yourself with a sense of audience. I don't think anyone my age or within 15 years of my age - I'm 51 - had that sense growing up, that you had an audience for your experiences. And my own kids who are high school age, wherever they go... or whatever trip they go on... or whatever they're thinking, they can post it and have an audience for it. And, I think, it's not fictional. It's not a fictional mindset. It's a “I've-done-this-and-now-you-guys-can-respond-to-it” kind of mindset. I don't know if that's the main influence, but I think it can't help but be an influence. People are experiencing things, and as they're experiencing them, they want to know what the response is. And it seems to me that that leads into personal essay writing. It's a much more difficult form than posting on Facebook, but I think a lot of the impulse might be the same.

Also, people had timed the rise of the memoir to pre-911 and post-911. I don't feel like I've figured that one out, but there was a lot of talk that that kind of jolt of reality somehow gave a boost to non-fiction, because you're facing things that are difficult. And people assumed that fiction wasn't as urgent enough in that way. I don't know, but that was another influence back then.

What do you look for in an essay submission? What for you are the key ingredients of a compelling story or personal essay?

It's very hard to answer. But a lot of it has to do with, not enough people writing personal essay realize that it can't just be a summarized story from your life. It has to employ the tools of drama that a reader needs - have scenes and dialogue - and the narrator needs to be transported from one place to a new understanding by the end. And hopefully some of that will be shown through scene and dialogue, instead of just told. People consider nonfiction writing or essay writing similar to journal writing, but journal writing is often just that summary style where you're getting it down. So much of what I get that doesn't work, even if it's good writing, is the 'this happened, then this happened, and then this happened' kind of storytelling where you're really just telling a summary of whatever you've just been through, and you're not really shaping into something that has a sense of plot or drama about it.

Beyond that, I think a tone - or a voice - that expresses curiosity rather than judgment or intelligence that you're trying to get down to the page. It's usually a curious but smart voice that works in these essays, someone who has been humbled by experience and is generously sharing that. A lot of material I get that doesn't work can be show-offy, in sort of a trying to be funny. Oh, a typical essay I get is “the long list of losers that I've gone out with.” That has to be really well done to work and not many people do it that well. It's a stance of “I'm better than all these people” and “these people are all nuts!” You don't want to hear people rant on about stuff like that.

You mentioned that you've become a better editor over the years. In what way?

In the early days, these could be difficult essays to edit - very personal stories where you're asking very personal questions and changing peoples' words in ways that cause conflict. That I almost never have anymore. Most of it is that I've gotten better at being able to talk through an essay and probe for more material, or whatever, in ways that are just professional. I don't feel like it is a fraught process anymore, and maybe that comes across to the writer. It's just like, “This is what we need to do,” and it's just a smooth, smooth process. I've learned what's missing in an essay and how to ask for it. I've learned how to write in material based on an interview with a writer, and have them massage it into their style. So that editorial process is probably the most easy and fun part of the job at this point. The hardest is saying “no” all day long and having to write an explanation to someone I would owe an explanation to about why a piece doesn't work. There's an art to that that I don't think one ever quite masters.

How do you work with the writers? Are most essays you accept pretty much “there” when they're submitted?

It's certainly nice to get a piece that is close, and that just requires cutting. The piece I'm working on right now, which is for mid-February is a piece that was 1800 words, really perfectly written from start to finish, and it's just trying to find 300 words to take out. It's just not very hard. It doesn't require a lot of back and forth.

But the essays that I've worked on in the past year - and I work on a lot - were really good stories or powerful perspectives that I wanted to run, but they needed work. And it wasn't that I felt I was doing a person a favor, it was just that, “This is a really good story and I want to get it in, and we're going to go back and forth on this enough times that it gets into that shape.”

But it is true that in the first years of doing the column, when I didn't have this sort of glut of material, I would do a ton of work on something. There was a piece that I ran that someone recommended - a writer that he'd been teaching in a workshop and she was working on this 5,000 word essay. And I had to take a 5,000 word essay and cut it down to a 1,700 word essay. And that was a lot of work. It was worth it and I learned from it, but I would never do that these days. If something comes in over 1,800 words, I just say, “You didn't read the guidelines.” It would really have to be good and close for me to take it on.

As far as your own book, Love Illuminated, can you describe what your writing process was like? How did you find the structure for it?

This is the first nonfiction book I've written from start to finish. I had a novel that came out in 2000, and the process of writing that was like the famous quote, that writing a novel is like driving a car at night where you can only see as far as your headlights shine, but you can make the whole trip that way. I didn't know what was more than 30 feet ahead of me and I just kept writing that way forward and I didn't jump ahead, I just kept writing forward.

Love Illuminated, I felt, needed a structure. The real challenge with this book for me was, “What can I say about this that hasn't been said a million times?” and “What can I bring to it that another writer on this subject matter couldn't?” It seemed to me I had all these stories - both published and unpublished - that I could draw upon and I had my own experience, my own marriage and all of that as material, to the point where I ought to be able to see trends in it and how was I going to compile that into a book? 

I made several attempts. I have a very blunt agent who is not afraid to say, “What were you thinking?” and I had a couple of stabs at book ideas that just were not right and mostly based on what I thought a book like this needed to be, based on what I'd read and gone to the shelves in Barnes and Noble and saw what people were writing about. And my agent, she was very good at saying, “This has to be a book that you would want to write, put the other models out of your mind.”

It didn't really come to me until I wrote what became the first words of the introduction to the book, which was: “Let's start with a quiz.” You know, so many of these books start with quizzes, and they're serious. They have a quiz, and if you answer a quiz in a certain way, then you get a score and it means something. It just seemed sort of ridiculous to me. But I thought, if I were to start with a quiz... and I'd write that sentence in a wry way instead of an earnest way... what would that quiz be? And what were the questions? Everything that I get - all these essays I get - are not answers, but they're all questions that are like, “How do I figure this out?” and “What am I supposed to do about this?” So I thought, what would be the 10 questions that would be most representative of all the stories I read? And I came up with those 10 questions really pretty quickly. And those 10 questions were the themes that were sort of the progression of love in someone's life from start to finish. And within each of those themes were stories that represented situations, trends and all of that; and it was just a matter of going to chapter to chapter and stitching all of that together, and trying to say things that were smart and funny about them, and use examples so that people would have stories to latch onto that would demonstrate what I was talking about. It was really hard for the first few chapters, and then it got easier and easier and easier, and by the end it felt very natural. I had to go back to the earlier chapters and try to get that easier style back into the material that had been over-worked.

How did you juggle your job as the Editor of Modern Love with writing your book? Did you write at night and off hours?

No, I couldn't. I could only do it in several days in a row. And that was different than my novel. I had a full-time job when I wrote my novel, a 9 to 5 job and a little kid. And that I did at night, like 9 to 1 in the morning, or something, and I just had momentum.

With this book, I had to take days off. It was excruciating because, you know, my in-box doesn't stop and my weekly deadlines don't stop and all the busy work associated with the column doesn't stop. And you have to write badly in order to write well; you have to turn out all this crap. And I'd just keep saying to myself, “I don't have time to go through this phase of the book. I don't have time to write badly. I just have to write well.” Of course, that was ridiculous. But those days were horrible. I would just spend day after day after day falling further behind at work, but not really making progress. I was making progress on the book, but it didn't feel like progress. I felt like I was just spinning my wheels and further behind at the same time. The good thing about the column is it's not timely, and if I get a good amount of material - it takes some doing, but - I can get ahead and get some breathing room. And I just had to keep doing that, I had to keep pushing that ahead, getting the submission's pile down as far as I could get it to feel comfortable, and then taking time off. A friend of mine loaned me their farmhouse in New Hampshire for a full week once and that was really important, to be off the internet and to really have time where I wasn't responsible for anything else.

Yeah, but writing books is so hard. I don't know how people do it.

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