A Conversation with Tara Schuster

Oh my, how quickly things change in just one week!

I'm writing to you from the trenches in Los Angeles where we have been ordered to stay at home as this global health crisis unfolds. I hope this finds you safe, wherever you are in the world.

Let me tell you about the awesome woman I'm featuring this month! Tara Schuster, the current Vice President of Talent and Development at Comedy Central, has a new memoir out called Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies. While it may be an odd time for a book release, the theme of the book couldn't be more relevant. It's all about how to take care of yourself, and in our interview below, Tara offers some helpful ways to think about what that means in the current climate.

Tara, by the way, will be visiting the Unlocking Your Story workshop this Spring! 

---

Tara Schuster is an author, playwright, and accomplished entertainment executive, currently serving as Vice President of Talent and Development at Comedy Central. She is currently the Executive in Charge of Lights Out with David Spade and was the Executive in Charge of the Emmy® and Peabody Award-winning Key & Peele. Her plays have been performed in The New York International Fringe Festival and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and Forbes online.

Tara's hilarious and relatable self-help/memoir Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies tells the story of Tara’s path to re-parenting herself and becoming a “ninja of self-love.” By the time Tara was in her late twenties, she was a rising TV executive who had worked for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and helped launch Key & Peele to viral superstardom. By all appearances, she had mastered being a grown-up. But beneath that veneer of success, she was a chronically anxious, self-medicating mess.

Through simple, daily rituals, Tara transformed her mind, body, and relationships and hopes to help readers do the same. Her aim for the book is to help readers to create a life they truly, totally f*cking LOVE.

(Photo credit: Diana Ragland)

KARIN GUTMAN: How do you feel about releasing a book during this global crisis that is COVID-19?

TARA SCHUSTER: It's already difficult to launch a book, and then to launch a book within a pandemic is obviously much more difficult. I could get really depressed and down about all the events that we've had to cancel, or... the truth is I wrote this book because I thought this was my mission. As cheesy as it sounds, I felt like it was. The reason I was put on earth was to make other people feel less lonely in their experience. And now, more than ever, that is necessary.

So now I'm taking what could be a depressing situation and instead saying, “Let me be there for people. Let me get the mission of the book out there even more,” because we absolutely must take care of ourselves. In a crisis, if we are ground down and burnt out and not taking care of ourselves, we will not be able to help anyone around us. And so, I think it's really important, now more than ever, that people take themselves seriously and see that they're worth taking care of.

KARIN: What does taking care of ourselves look like?

TARA: The book is about practical, habitual changes you can make in your life. Big, big change scares the hell out of me, so I don't advocate that for anybody else. But the idea of habits and routine, and how rituals build stability... you can very easily get rid of your morning routine right now and stop working out and stop writing your gratitude list and stop journaling, because you stayed up so late watching Netflix, because you were trying to numb out. Or, you could hang on to those really good self-care rituals in the face of crisis.

I write a lot about exercise, which seems so basic. But I don't think everybody gets that message—that exercise, scientifically and just from my own journey, relieved such anxiety. And here in Los Angeles, my gym closed. Then I thought, “Aha, but I'll use my apartment building's gym.” And then, I go to that gym, and it's closed. And then, I went to the manager of the building and she would only talk to me through a glass door. And I stopped myself on the verge of tears, because exercising is such a central ritual for my self-care.

As I was in there, looking through the glass at the manager, I realized, “Wait, there's another door here.” It was the door to the stairwell of my apartment building, where I was like, “Oh, I can listen to Missy Elliott, and do 40 minutes of cardio.” That's a great workout in the stairwell, and there's literally no one here, and I'm not touching anything. The underlying thesis of the book is: you re-frame things. You are the narrator. So, you decide, Is this just total misery and chaos and awful, or is there something to be learned from it? And can you keep up some of your habits?

Yes, of course, this is a crisis. In no way do I minimize that. Obviously, this is a pandemic. But that doesn't mean everything has to be miserable and a worst-case scenario.

KARIN: We can also invent new rituals. I have a 7-year-old daughter who is home right now, and we’re inventing what that looks like for everyone.

TARA:  Totally. For me, it's the opposite case. I've had a lot of people reach out to me saying, “It's difficult because all my kids are home, and so I'm having trouble working from home,” and lack of space. What I reminded them is that I'm all alone. I don't have a family or a partner or anyone. And so, I've had to come up with rituals to connect to people, and remembering that none of us are alone in our feelings of “this fucking sucks.” It doesn't matter your circumstance—full family, single, elderly—we all have to share this. It's a societal pain and disruption that we all are sharing in, right now.

KARIN: As you know, I teach memoir workshops, which you’ll be visiting in June! I’ve decided to teach them via Zoom for the spring sessions while this situation plays out.

TARA: Oh, great.

KARIN: I feel it’s really important to find ways to stay connected during this time.

TARA: Absolutely. I think it's important to also recognize, we say, “I'm going to self-improve this part of my life, when I have time.” Like, “When I've got my shit together, when I've got enough money… I'm going to work on my exercise, or my practice of non-judgment, or my book I've always wanted to write… when I have time.” Well guess what? We have time.

You could look at this as an absolute disaster and disruption, or that this is the reality. So how can I use it to my benefit and the benefit of my community? I think I'm going to use this time to work on the proposal for my second book. I have the time right now, so why not?

KARIN: How did you juggle a full-time job with writing your book?

TARA: I really have two separate careers, and I really thought of them as separation of church and state. So in the morning, I would basically chain myself to my desk, set a timer for an hour before I went to work. No Twitter, no Facebook, no Amazon, no nothing. Just writing. And then go work out, to change the gears in my head, and then go to work.

So that's been my process of writing, because it would be too overwhelming to try to juggle my job and my writing together. So I made them very distinct parts of my life.

KARIN: It sounds very structured.

TARA: Yeah, it was. I literally set a timer for an hour and when the timer went off, I was free to leave my desk. But I'm not a morning person. I had to trick myself into being a morning person in order to write the book. That was the only way I could do it, because I think I'm my smartest in the morning. And then I watch myself become slowly dumb as the day wears on. I could never write after work. I don't even know what I would say after work. I'm usually so tired.

And then on weekends...on Saturday, from 8:00 to 11:00. And if I needed more, sometimes it would be all of Saturday and all of Saturday night. But then, I tried never to write on Sundays. I tried to have one day where I wasn't on the hook. I didn't have to write.

KARIN: When you said you 'tricked' yourself, what was the carrot?

TARA: The carrot was a book. There was no other way this book was going to get written. Something I'd have to remind myself when I'd complain to myself is, “Nobody asked me to write this book.” It's not like a bunch of publishers were knocking down my door for me to do this. I embarked on it because I felt like I had a voice, and I had something to say. And the only way I was going to get to say it was if I fucking did it. So, the carrot was the book. And once I put it that way, it was never a question.

I also set up my home office, something I picked up in Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, which is so important to me. She talks a lot about discipline, the difference between discipline and enthusiasm. So many people have said to me, “Oh, you're so disciplined that you did this.” I'm like, “Truly, I wish that the word discipline applied to me, that would make my ego feel very good. It's enthusiasm.” Like… I'm really excited to write the book. I'm ecstatic that I had a place that wanted to publish the book. I let my enthusiasm drive me, and so it was a pleasure to wake up. The trick was, instead of, “Oh I have to do this,” is, “I get to do this,” and I let my enthusiasm drive the process.

KARIN: What was the publishing process like? It sounds like you had someone interested during the writing process.

TARA: I wrote a proposal with my agent over the course of nine months. A very detailed proposal, with a hundred sample pages and a complete outline. We pitched that to a bunch of different publishers, and it sold at auction, which was completely unexpected. I would have written the book for free, which I never want to tell my publisher, but I was determined that it really didn't matter, that I was going to do this. I preferred to do it with a real publisher, that was my dream. But I would have been happy to self-publish, because I felt like it was an important message to get out there.

KARIN: Why do you think there was a bidding war?

TARA: Yeah, why in the world would anybody...

KARIN: You can't take that the wrong way. Come on, now.

TARA: I'm just teasing. Remember I work in comedy.

KARIN: Right.

TARA: I think what it was… I have heard four million pitches. Working in TV, I hear pitches all day. I went to Brown for playwriting and Paula Vogel was one of my professors. The two things that those have in common is: at Comedy Central, we look for an authentic point of view, a real take on something. And Paula once told me that writing is about putting your thumbprint on the world and really getting down to your DNA. What is your unique take?

So I had practice in both identifying point of view and writing my point of view. So I think the pitch was just me on paper. After hearing a lot of pitches, I know it's hard to do that. It's hard to be really authentic and to not try to sell what you think will sell, but to be vulnerable. And actually, what's funny is that, one of the number one pieces of feedback I get from people is, “Oh my God, you're so honest. I can't believe how honest you are.”

At this point I've totally taken for granted that we're not all just honest all the time, because I've spent three years holding myself to the standard of, “Is this honest? Is this kind? Is this the most vulnerable I can be about it?” And I think that came through in the pitch.

KARIN: It's one thing to be able to identify an authentic, unique point of view. It's another thing to access that in yourself. Is that something that simply comes naturally to you? Or is that something that you learned?

TARA: I've talked to my editor about this. Not only did I go to school for playwriting, where Paula Vogel's style of teaching is basically, how much can you write? Like, a volume game. Don't be precious, don't self-edit. Write, write, write. And my number one piece of writing advice is that writing begets writing. I can't explain it, but if you write, you will write more. And if you don't write, you won't write anything. It's so simple, but it's so true.

And so, I think it's a combination of learning early in my writing career not to self-censor, and then taking up journaling in my mid 20s… those two things together. In my book I describe it as receiving DM’s from my soul. Like sneaky private messages of what was most true about me.

And journaling… I don't know of any other way I could have gotten to the point where now I can write consistently, in my own voice. Which is a funny thing because I'm me. After I wrote the book, they give you a style guide of your writing, like, What phrases do you use? Are thoughts in italics or are they in quotations? It's interesting because the copywriters may hold you to be even more consistent with yourself than you already are.

The whole process of writing the book—if you're writing memoir—makes you get more and more precise about your voice, and about how you talk about things. Like, "You call this friend this, but did you mean this?" And, "You use this word… did you really mean this word?"

KARIN: Did your journal voice change when you started writing the manuscript? Was it harder to be honest, because suddenly you're aware that you're writing for an audience?

TARA: For me, when I'm journaling, I know that nobody's ever going to read it and it's just for me. Journaling is how I rev up my engine. My process is: I journal for 20 minutes, then I meditate, then I write. So journaling is almost like, “Let me get all this shit out of my head. All these stupid thoughts, the distractions. Let me just get that all out of my head.”

KARIN: Like Julia Cameron’s morning pages?

TARA: Exactly. It's totally, 100%, Julia Cameron's morning pages. I just word vomit. Then, when I get to the actual writing, I'm more focused and in touch with myself. From that place, I write. I always imagine a reader with me. It's usually me as a little girl. Or, a reader who wants someone to be present with them. Sometimes I imagine a young woman or a young man, but there's always somebody in the room with me. I always think about them when I write. So, it's a two-pronged approach: I get all the garbage out of my head and align myself with my voice; and then I think about, “This writing now is for somebody else.” It is definitely for an audience, which is the big difference from journaling.

KARIN: Are these usually people you know?

TARA: I guess it's a little bit of a combination. I've got some undisclosed people that I think about, that I think could use the book. I'll think of one person, and then I'll think of people like them, and then I'll start to write. It's a little loose in that way.

KARIN: What about exposure? Given that you have a certain professional visibility, how is that for you now that the book is out?

TARA: It's tough. I was a little afraid that in my professional career, where I'm supposed to be a gatekeeper and an executive, that people would look down on me, or judge me, for being vulnerable. But then I realized, “Fuck them.” If somebody doesn't want to work with me, or they judge me because I was vulnerable and open, then why would that be somebody I wanted to work with anyway? So I had to tune it out. But it was really scary. I can completely empathize with other people who are nervous. But once you take the leap you realize, “Oh, that wasn't so scary, I'm going to be fine.”

KARIN: What has changed for you having written the book? Has anything shifted? Have you realized something that maybe you didn't know at the beginning of the process?

TARA: Yeah. So, this is going to sound crazy, but I thought the book might change my life in some material way. Like, I'd meet new people and maybe new career paths would be open to me. And that's all very true. But what I didn't expect was for the book to fundamentally change my life and the way I see everything. I thought it was going to be the end, like, “Okay, I have reconciled my childhood. I've given my offering. Here's the book. It's a tangible thing.” And now I realize, it's only the beginning. And it's fucking shocking. I'm in a process of reevaluating my relationships and the way I live. Because the message of the book, which was so clear to me, wasn't even completely clear to me until I finished it. Until it was in the world, and people were talking to me about it. So, it completely changed my life. It showed me I have so much more work to do, and that the book was not the end. It was just the beginning, as cheesy as that sounds.

KARIN: Can you give a specific example?

TARA: All of my relationships… Do I have strong enough boundaries? For every one of my rituals, I ask myself, What's the evolution of that? How present am I for my own life? How willing to feel my feelings am I? Where I thought it would be a 'period' to my childhood and to re-parenting, it's more like a complete new beginning, which I absolutely did not expect.




Buy the book!

To learn more about Tara Schuster, visit her website.

See all author interviews

A Conversation with Regina Louise

We are at the tail end of Black History Month, and I wish to celebrate by spotlighting the work of an extraordinary woman, Regina Louise, who is a true artistic force to be reckoned with. She is the author of two memoirs about her experience traveling through over 30 foster homes in her youth and emerging triumphantly on the other side. Her story has recently been adapted as a Lifetime movie that is viewable on Amazon Prime.

---

After living in over 30 foster homes and overcoming dangerous withdrawals from inaccurately prescribed drugs, Regina Louise took charge of her life. After missing many years of formal education and labeled 'below-average or marginal at best,' Regina's optimism and perseverance has helped her become a clear definition of resilience.

Author of the bestselling memoir Somebody's Someone, Regina's story has been featured on NPR's All things Considered, The Tavis Smiley Show and The CBS Early Show.

She is a leadership coach in human services, a Hoffman Process teaching candidate, and the winner of an Adoption Excellence Award from the Administration for Children and Families. She is also a trauma-informed trainer who advocates on behalf of foster youth and their emotional permanency. She lives in Northern California.

In her most recent memoir, Someone Has Led This Child to Believe, Regina tells the true story of overcoming neglect in the US foster-care system. Drawing on her experience as one of society's abandoned children, she recounts how she emerged from the cruel, unjust system, not only to survive, but to flourish.

This unflinching, unforgettable account has been adapted as a Lifetime movie, “I am Somebody's Child,” which can be viewed on Amazon Prime.

KARIN GUTMAN: It's Black History Month and you recently attended the NAACP Image Awards. Can you tell us about it?

REGINA LOUISE: Every year the NAACP Image Awards recognizes a film and literature and music that has been created to highlight the gifts and contributions of those of us of African American ancestry and identity. And my movie, I Am Somebody's Child, was nominated for Best Director and therefore the director invited me as her guest. So, I accepted.

KARIN: Nice!

REGINA: There are two events. One on Friday, which is a dinner and then one on Saturday, which is televised. The one on Saturday has all the mega stars—the Morgan Freeman’s, the Angela Bassette’s, the Jamie Fox’s, the Rihanna’s and Tiffany Haddish’s, and on and on.

Native Son won in the category of Best Director. As far as I'm concerned, when you're black in America, whoever wins is a win for all of us. So, it's a beautiful thing no matter how you cut it, because the work I do, have done, and hope to continue to do, isn't about me necessarily as much as it is about those who are historically underrepresented and those who are voiceless or marginalized. For me to know that the movie—no matter what the nomination is—has legs now, means a lot.

KARIN: I know the movie is largely based on your second book, Someone Has Led This Child to Believe. Can you tell us about the story?

REGINA: It was my master's thesis for graduate school. It is written in collage because to say that all the memories I have are 100% accurate, is pushing it. I wanted my memoir structurally to mimic memory—fragmented, nonlinear, with these collage-like moments. I think that the movie should have been a miniseries because it's such a vast story. In my book I jumped from 19 years old to 40, covering some of the most tumultuous years of my life.

KARIN: For people who are not familiar with your story, it might help to also share more about your first book, Somebody’s Someone.

REGINA: Somebody’s Someone is a story about my younger self being left in the care of my mother's foster, or kinship, family members. They were not of my ilk. We didn't jive. Our souls were not compatible. So, as a result of the abuse, I decided, I have to get out of here. I won't make it out alive if I stay. So, it's about my leaving, my activating agency at 11-years-old and leaving the situation for a better situation, not knowing what better was. But I knew it had to be an upshot from being beaten, neglected, and constantly shamed. It's a heroine's journey of taking my life into my own hands and manifesting my destiny and meeting up with a woman who wanted to be my mother, but wasn't allowed to because of racial differences during the '70s.

Then the second book, Someone Led This Child to Believe, picks up where the first leaves off. The ending of the second book rectifies the ending of the first book.

KARIN: I believe all of our stories contribute to a broader conversation that's happening in the world. How do you see your books, your stories, contributing to this conversation about race specifically?

REGINA: There are many conversations going on. Where am I in that conversation? I am in the conversation from the point of view that there are hundreds of thousands of young black girls in the foster care system. There are more children in foster care than there are in the general population of America. Let me say it this way… the conversation that I am narrating is about the overrepresentation of young girls in foster care and how they are continually being left behind.

The equity gap between foster youth or young black girls and their contemporaries is staggering. They're so behind, and the opportunity to be given a hand-up is not happening. They are a forgotten about demographic. Period.

I believe that my attempt—although a feeble one at best—has been to shake it up, to open the national narrative around it. I don't know if I've been successful at that. In terms of African American History Month, Cynthia Erivo, who played Harriet in the film, received an Oscar nomination as well as the NAACP nomination for the song “Stand Up.” I think we could all stand to learn from the words of that song. "I'm going to stand up, take my people with me, together we are going to a brand-new home."

Even though this song is about a time in the past, it's not. It's actually about the time right now; because if it weren't, there would be no need for the NAACP because there would be equity amongst all races and we both know that that's not true.

The bridge is so brilliant: “I believe it's my responsibility to turn my face to the sun and with a weight on my shoulder.”

That is so apropos for today… for people to take the weight, take the mantle of displaced children on their shoulders and, opposed to a bullet in the gun, take the intellectual pursuit of equality and justice for all. Use the Declaration of Independence to arm ourselves with what it means to close the gap on access, with respect to children in foster care and all disenfranchised children.

Black History Month for me is most effective when it is all encompassing. I love it when it's not just about the celebrities and stars, but also about those of us who are out there hustling day and night. Last year I canvased 47,000 miles on Amtrak across the country on behalf of unwanted children. That's real.

And I can say that I championed the movie for 17 years. Not for it to be about a white woman loving or saving a girl. It is really about agency. Perseverance. Sure, I had somebody model for me what love was. But what's most interesting is how I was able to scale that. How I was able to multiply that woman's kindness and generosity throughout my life. That to me is the definition of triumph of the spirit—to believe what is possible against all indictments.

To me that's what ties all the work I do to black history; not just this month, but every day, every trip I take, every time I say yes, I'm doing it on behalf of black children that are disremembered and unaccounted for. The ones that don't have a voice, the ones that could never in a million years afford to luxuriate in a lot of the successes that many of us have acquired. My work is to represent that.

KARIN: It can be challenging to talk about race. How can someone move beyond fear or hesitation and enter the conversation?

REGINA: It's to ask those questions that are relevant to my subjectivity. What is it like to be black in America? What is it like to be you? What has it been like to feel you constantly have to make a way where there isn't one? It's all about bedside manners to me, that we all do our best to recognize our biases and then to compassionately try and relax them so that we can make room for that “other person” to be in their their-ness and to allow that to just be.

KARIN: Let’s talk about your new book, for which you just landed a publishing deal. Congratulations! I know it’s a new kind of format for you. Can you talk about it?

REGINA: It's a set of strategies, actually. Strategies that I got by bootstrapping. I consider myself a straight up bootstrapper, and I consider myself a straight up, kick-ass kind of girl. I do what needs to be done by force or extreme effort. That to me is kick-ass. That’s what I had to be. It wasn't an option. Now I've chosen it as a superpower. Kickass!

So, I have a book full of strategies and activities and actionable steps that I'm offering people in a way that will hopefully encourage them to move past injunctions that moor them in  ineffectiveness or unhappiness. I think one of the virtues of my not being “parented” is that I have been my own savior. Isn't that what Adele said: "This time I'll be greater, I'll be my own savior." I know that quite well.

I know the dance of what it means to save myself again and again and again and to resurrect myself again and again and again. I never had the luxury of being moored in depression. I saw very recently… there was something online where someone creatively unpacked depression, to rephrase it as, “I pressed on.” Within depression is I pressed on, and I'm actually going to use that. How do you transmute, how do you transform depression? How does anybody do that? I didn't have the luxury to be depressed. I could only press on.

To learn more about Regina, visit her website.

See all interviews

A Conversation with Daniel M. Jaffe

I have recently gotten curious about the, sometimes, fine line between memoir and fiction. What makes memoir memoir, and at what point does it become a fictional telling of the story? Also, if you are debating between the two, how do you decide on the best way to write your narrative?

I had the unique opportunity to explore these questions with esteemed author and teacher Daniel M. Jaffe, who is a profound source of wisdom. He refers to his newest novel, Yeled Tov, as an autobiographical novel. It follows a Jewish teenager struggling to reconcile his devotion to Torah with his growing attraction to other young men. In fact, Dan initially wrote it as a memoir, so he knows intimately the experience of writing the same story in both forms. Scroll down to read our full interview.

---

Daniel M. Jaffe is a former corporate/securities attorney turned writer. Several of his short stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and dozens of his stories, essays, and articles have appeared in anthologies, literary journals and newspapers in many countries and languages. His work has been taught in college and university courses. He holds degrees from Princeton University (A.B.), Harvard Law School (J.D.), and Vermont College (M.F.A.).

His newest novel, YELED TOV (2018, Lethe Press), follows a Jewish teenager struggling to reconcile his devotion to Torah with his growing attraction to other young men. Can he be both Jewish and gay? Does he risk losing God's love?  

KARIN GUTMAN: We first met when I took your class at UCLA, “The Art of the Lie,” which used personal experience as a springboard for fiction. What inspired you to create such a course?

DANIEL M. JAFFE: Actually, I can’t take credit for having created that course. The now-retired Director of UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Dr. Linda Venis, was an endless source of course ideas.  After I’d been teaching in the Program for a couple years, Linda approached me with this particular course idea and asked if I’d like to teach it. Given that I’d had experience writing both fiction and memoir (as personal essay), the course was a natural fit. So, Linda provided me the course description and then let me develop a syllabus so as to take the course in my own direction. A really wonderful opportunity.

KARIN: I understand that your most recent novel, Yeled Tov, was originally written as a memoir, but then you adapted it as a novel. What was the reason behind this decision?

DANIEL: The notion of writing Yeled Tov evolved over time, as did its ultimate form. Yeled Tov (“Good Boy”) is a novel about a Jewish teenager, Jake, struggling to reconcile his observant and traditional religious beliefs with the growing awareness of his gayness. As his experiences and guilt intensify, Jake holds imaginary conversations with God, who is basically a manifestation of Jake’s own conscience. When Jake reaches a point where he feels completely wicked and beyond redemption, as a biblical abomination, he imagines God turning His back on him, and Jake attempts suicide.

This is all autobiographical, my most central and agonizing personal story. Thirty years ago, when I first committed myself to writing, I made a conscious decision to concentrate on fiction rather than memoir because I felt that fiction could mask real experiences that felt too private to acknowledge publicly—such as my coming out struggle and suicide attempt—yet still offer the opportunity to write about them with emotional honesty. Also, I could minimize the potential for embarrassment of my parents and any others whose lives intersected with mine. Among other things, I indeed wrote a number of short stories about teenage characters struggling with a religious-sexual identity conflict, including one where the teenager contemplated suicide.

Over time, however, I found myself increasingly wishing to be known beyond the fictional façade, so I started writing memoiristic personal essays, some addressing my teenage coming out struggle. Eventually, after Dad passed away and Mom lost awareness due to dementia, I no longer needed to worry about embarrassing them by exposing a painful, intensely painful period in their lives. Also, I wanted to publish a book addressing a tragic reality: even today, LGBTQ youth sometimes kill themselves out of a misplaced sense of shame. One source of that shame is religious teachings, a phenomenon I was in a good position to address.

Sometimes I write just for fun and to entertain, but at other times I write in order to promote social change, hopefully to help people. This was one of those times. We all know that fiction or memoir about personal trauma can help readers in similar circumstances feel less alone. Our writing can offer hope and, if we’re lucky, save lives.

So, I spent a couple of years writing a full-length memoir about my teenage struggle. One day when meeting with my publisher over lunch (he’d already published three of my books by then), I proudly announced what I’d written. Without so much as looking at the manuscript, he said, “Dan, gay memoir doesn’t really sell anymore. But if you re-write it as a novel—that I can sell.”

Hah! So now I’d come full circle: a process that had started as fiction, then shifted into memoir, now needed to return to fiction. So, I spent a year re-conceptualizing and re-writing, and the result is Yeled Tov, very much a novel rather than a memoir. What’s so interesting is that when interviewing me about this fictional work, the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, was most interested in its autobiographical aspects. They even published photographs of me with my parents so as to make the social-political point that an observant Jewish family can welcome a gay child. Fiction and memoir are completely blurred in this project.

KARIN: Do you think that’s true, that a gay memoir is not saleable?

DANIEL: As much as I feel a modest authority in discussing the writing of fiction and memoir, I feel absolutely no authority whatsoever in discussing the marketplace. I haven’t a clue as to what will sell and what won’t. All I know how to do is write.

That said, I think my publisher’s reluctance was specific to the topic of gay-themed memoir, rather than memoir in general. Even more specifically—memoirs about coming out. There are an awful lot of them out there, which is wonderful. I suppose those that sell best are those written by famous people. I can understand that—celebrity sells. And I ain’t no celebrity.

But this phenomenon is not limited to memoir. In my early years as writer, in the 1990’s, I wrote a couple of coming-out-themed novels loosely based on my experience, but not nearly as autobiographical as Yeled Tov. The late 1980’s-early 1990’s was a boom time for lesbian and gay fiction—our work was being taken seriously by the New York publishing establishment for the first time. One editor who was in charge of a major publisher’s lesbian-gay line of fiction kindly read one of my novels, but rejected it saying something about being tired of coming-out novels. He, as editor, was probably inundated with every single coming out novel being written at the time. But the general public? I, as one reader back then, couldn’t get enough of them. Every person’s coming-out experience is unique, and I found it incredibly soothing to read each and every such story I could get my hands on, as a sort of validation of my own struggles, a sense of camaraderie. But… it wasn’t up to me, it was up to this editor who had all the power. He was tired of the subject, so he assumed his readership was, as well. Maybe he was right. We’ll never know.

KARIN: Do you miss anything from its original iteration as a memoir?

DANIEL: Certainly, I had to cut out a lot from the memoir. The approach I took in the memoir was that of a middle-aged man looking back on his youth and re-visiting, interpreting. I could have taken a similar stance with the novel, but my publisher felt that a simpler, more direct approach would be better, particularly since he wanted to promote it to a late teen readership. So, a good deal of the memoir is gone, the self-conscious analysis that often marks what I think of as strong memoir.

Initially, while re-writing the material as fiction, I felt pain at cutting much material.  I think it’s Annie Dillard in her incredibly insightful book, The Writing Life, who points out that, before we can truly cut material out of a draft and just move on to write what’s best for the work, we need to forget the pain of having written our treasured lines. Gradually, as I developed new material and re-shaped, I forgot the pain and time and effort spent on writing what I now had to cut out.  The novel became its own entity, and I stopped focusing on what it wasn’t.

KARIN: Do you think writing the memoir help make the fictional version better?

DANIEL: I think I could have written Yeled Tov directly as novel. Whether the memoir form as “first draft” ultimately made the fiction stronger or not, I can’t tell. To be perfectly honest, I no longer remember details of the memoir version. It’s as if the novel over-wrote and erased it.

KARIN: What new things did you discover in the fictional story? What liberties did you take, that hopefully, made it a better story?

DANIEL: Whether the novel or memoir is a “better” story or not, I can’t say. But they’re certainly “different” from one another.

As I mentioned a little earlier, the structure changed in that the memoir was reminiscent—an adult looking back at his life, whereas the novel simply follows the teenager forward from late high school through early college.

In terms of liberties, the novel version freed me up to write a different outcome for the character.  In real life, I didn’t quickly heal after my college suicide attempt. I continued to suffer and struggle for years. In the memoir, I made clear that eventually, I did find an inner peace, I found a wonderful man—Leo and I have been together now for over 26 years, legally married for over 6—and found profound acceptance by family and community. Given that the memoir’s focus was on my teen years, I didn’t need to go into detail about my adult life in order to make the story complete. The reader could accept the story as limited to a difficult time, and could also accept that the difficulty eased later on even if I didn’t write about that; after all, I was alive and writing, so the reader knew I hadn’t ultimately killed myself.

Certainly, I could have ended the novel with some sort of leap forward in time to show Jake, the main character, finding happiness years later. But that would have violated the way I handled time in the novel, which was moment-by-moment during two years of Jake’s life. And such an ending would have felt rather forced.

Another option would have been to have Jake succumb to his depression. But that was exactly opposite the message I wanted to offer readers, particularly younger ones. Up until the late 20th-century, so many LGBTQ-themed novels ended in suicide or death. Enough! The whole point of writing this novel was to suggest that LGBTQ people could find ways to thrive even after experiencing difficult personal struggles.

So, I needed to come up with an ending that fit with the novel’s handling of time, yet didn’t have some false, sudden turn-around where years of suffering magically transformed into happiness. Such an ending would have trivialized the very suffering Jake had experienced. What I came up with was a series of post-suicide-attempt conversations for Jake with family, friends, a therapist, and God, all of whom are saddened by the suicide attempt. Up until the suicide attempt, he torments himself within himself, never reaching out to another person. After the attempt, when others are now reaching out to him, he can’t avoid such conversations. They get him out of his own head, and help him realize that there might be different ways of looking at his situation, at Jewish religious teachings, and his future. That’s how the novel ends, with Jake finally beginning to connect authentically with the people around him and beginning to accept the possibility—just the possibility—that he’s not such an awful person, that he might fit within Jewish tradition, and that his future might not be as bleak as he’s imagined. By the end of the novel, he has earned something he had not possessed until then—hope.

KARIN: I believe that there is a healing component to writing. Did you experience that with this book, a kind of personal transformation in the writing of it?

DANIEL: Oh my gosh, this is so true for me. I experience healing in my writing all the time.  No matter what we’re writing, it’s coming from our psyches, so it’s us on the page. Whether we have happy dreams when we sleep or nightmares, we’re working out some issue or other, right?  It’s the same with writing. We’re processing. We don’t always reach clarities, but we’re wrestling with our angels and demons both.

In Yeled Tov, after Jake’s suicide attempt, he finally confides in another Jewish character that he attempted to end his life as a reaction to the Torah’s prohibition against homosexuality. The other character responds, “My dear friend… We’re supposed to live by the Torah, not die by it.” Here I’d been writing for years about my own life, yet I’d never articulated and distilled that thought until the very moment my fictional character said it.

I never had such a conversation with a Jewish friend in real life. Nobody ever said line that to me. I never even voiced it to myself. Yet at the very moment I wrote it, I experienced an epiphany… 40 years after my own suicide attempt. It came out of my writing through a fictional character’s voice. And I don’t mean it came from the character based on myself; it came out of a character loosely based on an actual friend from my past, an observant Jewish woman of great compassion. After I wrote that sentence, I lifted my hands from the keyboard, covered my face, and wept. Finally I was able to say, in one sentence, the healing phrase I’d been needing to hear all these decades. Decades. It’s become my mantra. This is the personal power of writing fiction.

KARIN: What do you like to read? What are you reading these days?

I read all kinds of things. Novels, short story collections, memoirs, histories, plays. Sometimes, I do background reading related to projects I have in mind. I’ve been reading some memoirs by former Soviet dissidents because I’m considering writing a memoir about my experiences in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when I studied for a short time in the Soviet Union and met various dissidents. Once I began studying in law school, I undertook to translate documents for them—political trial transcripts and so forth—so as to advocate for their causes in the West. An old friend of mine, Alla Podrabinek, recently completed a memoir of her life in Siberian exile with her dissident husband, Aleksandr. I loved reading that one, both for elaborations on what I remembered of their lives and for episodes that were new to me. And I’m now reading a classic dissident memoir, My Testimony by Anatoly Marchenko, one of the first memoirs of life in the Soviet gulag. I read/am reading these in Russian so as to brush up on my language skills.  Reading a foreign language helps with my English prose because it keeps me sensitive to word choice, sentence structure rhythm, and tone.

I’m also reading a collection of Philip Roth’s prose writings—essays, interviews with him, and interviews he conducted with other writers. Several reviewers have compared my writing with his, so I enjoy reading his take on his own work.

I recently finished a collection of short stories by Louis Auchincloss, a remarkable fiction writer known for his spot-on renderings of New York high society. I’d long heard of him, but had never read him before. I bought a book of his stories in a used book shop in Merced, so that I’d have something to read during a trip to Yosemite. Now I’m a fan!

KARIN: What advice would you give to a writer who is not sure whether to write the story as fiction or memoir?

I think of autobiographical fiction and memoir as being on a continuum. Some autobiographical fiction is loosely based on real life. Some memoir takes liberties with facts in order to render psychological truth more clearly. They’re definitely related forms and they blur. It’s often difficult to find a bright line between them. I think it’s a question of emphasis, and of how we want to hold the work out to the world. As I mentioned a little earlier, if we label something “memoir,” the reader makes certain assumptions about the writer’s life after the period covered in the work because the reader knows facts not covered in the actual memoir—the author survived Soviet labor camps, for example. After reading a novel, the reader might speculate about the main characters’ futures, but can’t really know for sure.

Maybe the wisest way to start writing a story based on real life experience is to dive in and write it however it comes out on the page. As you’re drafting, ask yourself if you’re altering what really happened, and why. Are you censoring yourself, avoiding writing down some painful things? Are you trying to “protect” real people in your life? (Keep in mind that there’s a difference between writing memoir and publishing it—you can always write and explore something yet wait until some later date to seek publication, if ever.) Can you bring yourself to write what you’re avoiding, or do you need to mask or avoid it for some reason? Answering these questions might help you figure out whether your work is more made-up than not, where on the memoir-fiction continuum it fits.

KARIN: When you say that "some memoir takes liberties with facts," what do you mean exactly?

DANIEL: What I meant is something like recording a conversation that happened years ago.  We can imagine a scenario where, in real life, there were 10 people in a room during an important conversation, and each chimed in, and the narrator gleaned an epiphany from that input.  In real life, when we know a large number of people very well, we can react instantly to each comment because we have so much context for each person's reaction.  We intuitively weigh Cousin X's comments more than Cousin Y's because Cousin X is a therapist and Cousin Y is generally obtuse, but maybe this time Cousin Y makes an unusually good point, and Aunt A amplifies that point and the narrator weighs Aunt A's reaction heavily because she's always been so insightful, in contrast to Uncle D who's chiming in but he's always been an idiot, etc.

To include all this and more, all these comments and the narrator's reactions might be confusing for a reader because, in a memoir, we likely wouldn't have the space to fully develop each of those 10 people well enough so that the reader could grasp the narrator's intuitive reactions. So, in writing the memoir, in order to keep focus on the psychological truth and what's important--a group of relatives got together and influenced the narrator's thinking--the memoir might describe that conversation with only 3 relatives having been in that room. Taking liberties with the facts to render with greater clarity what's really important.

But here's where taking liberties would violate the psychological truth: if we're writing a memoir episode of a 7-year-old boy who stole a Babe Ruth candy bar, but we write, instead, that he stole a Cadillac... well, yes, both versions are about a little boy stealing, but they represent very different psychological dynamics. It's a question of proportion and degree.

KARIN: Are you still teaching? Where can people take a class from you?

I teach less now than in the past. This February 29, I’ll be offering a one-day workshop through UCLA Extension Writers’ Program called, “Inspiring Our Muse: Nurturing the Writer Within.” It’s a course about the writing process, about sparking our imagination and tapping into our creativity. There are still spots available, should any of your readers care to sign up!

Buy the book!

To learn more about Daniel M. Jaffe, visit his website.

See all interviews