A Conversation with Barbara Abercrombie

This month I had the great pleasure of interviewing Barbara Abercrombie, a writer and longtime beloved teacher of memoir at UCLA Extension Writers' Program. After knowing Barbara's name for years, I finally had the chance to meet her last February at the San Miguel Writers' Conference in Mexico where we were both teaching. Now looking back, it feels like an alternate magical reality we experienced, remarkably fleeting, just days before our world shifted into lockdown.

Barbara's new book, The Language of Loss, drops next week. It is a compilation of poetry and prose writings that Barbara collected about grief and loss—the book she says she was yearning for after her husband died five years ago. In our conversation below, she shares about what goes into publishing an anthology, along with her terrific insights about the craft of memoir.

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Barbara Abercrombie has published novels, children’s picture books, including the award winning Charlie Anderson, and books of non-fiction. Her personal essays have appeared in national publications as well as in many anthologies. Her most recent books on writing, A Year of Writing Dangerously and Kicking in The Wall, were chosen by Poets & Writers Magazine as two of the best books for writers.

New World Library will publish her 16th book, The Language of Loss, an anthology of poetry and prose for grieving and celebrating the love of one’s life, in November 2020.

Barbara received the Outstanding Instructor award and the Distinguished Instructor Award at UCLA Extension where she teaches creative writing. She lives in Los Angeles and Lake Arrowhead with her rescue dogs, Nina and Nelson.

KARIN GUTMAN: You mention that you wrote the book you wished you had when your husband died. Can you share more about your experience and how this book came about?

BARBARA ABERCROMBIE: My way through bad times is always to read, and when my husband died five and a half years ago what I wanted and needed to read was a book of poetry and prose about grieving for a spouse/ lover/ partner. I couldn’t find an anthology with that focus so I decided to create my own—The Language of Loss. I spent months reading a lot of memoir and also poetry—and then I did the hard part—getting permissions. Most of the material has been published before. There are amazing poets in it: Mary Oliver, E.E. Cummings, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Charles Bukowski. And writers: C.S. Lewis, Patti Smith, Abigail Thomas, and Joyce Maynard. I’m in love with the writers and poets in it.

KARIN: How challenging, or not, was it to garner the interest of a publisher? Did you have a strong hand in editing it?

BARBARA: My agent liked my book proposal and sold it to New World Library (a wonderful publishing company who had brought my books on writing into the world.) I edited the book—choosing all the material—and then created an arc through abject grief to getting through it and finally to celebrating the love one lost. My editor at NWL offered suggestions and my copy editor (whom I owe my soul to) caught all my typos and mistakes.

KARIN: What are the legalities for putting a compilation together like this one? Do you have any advice for people who might like to do something similar?

BARBARA: I had to get permission for everything I used, and to pay for much of it. I don’t do well with paper work and it was a long slog—copyrights had to be traced, sometimes I also needed UK rights, and sometimes it took numerous emails to get publishers to reply. I had a real passion though to get this book published. It’s the only one of its kind, so all of the slog was more than worth it.

KARIN: As a longtime teacher of memoir, how do you approach (or suggest) writers begin the process of writing their personal story?

BARBARA: I suggest writing out the story from start to finish. I call this the WTF draft. I also think it’s important to take a good memoir class where you’ll get inspired when you get stuck and learn the basics of craft. A class where you feel safe to write anything and the teacher is in control of comments—meaning that no one gets snarky and everyone feels supported. We’re all so vulnerable writing memoir! I tell my students that all feedback to each other must be honest and detailed but also generous and always aware of the potential of what’s being read. And that the experience and behavior is not to be critiqued, just the writing.

KARIN: What do you believe are the most important aspects when it comes to the craft of memoir? What do you find to be the most challenging things to master?

BARBARA: The tone/the voice.
(This never gets easy no matter how many books you write.)
The story you’re writing, not just the feelings.
The structure.
The take away, the universal thread to your experience.

Writing memoir is challenging, period.

KARIN: Writers in my workshops tend to generate a lot of material and can sometimes get frustrated that it’s not all adding up to something. In other words, the bigger telling still remains elusive. What would you say to that?

BARBARA: I ask my students, “What is the knot you’re trying to unravel in this story?” And anything that doesn’t connect to that knot should be cut. If a scene doesn’t serve the story and connect to the larger story, or add to understanding the characters—cut.

KARIN: Do you have any tips on how to approach structure?

BARBARA: I have absolutely no tips on structure! There are no rules or guidelines—each writer has to find structure for him/herself. And you find it by writing. Okay, one tip: Read. Study how other writers do it. That’s how you learn to write anything.

KARIN: I also find that writers can get hung up on TENSE—whether they should write in present or past tense, or whether they can move back and forth. What would you say?

BARBARA: I personally like to write memoir in present tense—yes, it feels more alive. And then do all memories/flashbacks in past tense. I’ve found that perspective can work in present tense. Realizations, epiphanies can happen in real time.

KARIN: What do you think is the biggest hurdle to publishing a memoir and what is your advice on that front?

BARBARA: The biggest hurdle may be to have a subject that will connect with other people and how to tell the story so it will connect. How your story—though not necessarily identical—can give the reader their own story. I think this is hard in the beginning because our WTF draft is basically telling us our own story and, let’s face it, is therapy writing. So after the first draft it’s a matter of rewriting, coming up with a book proposal that will grab an agent or editor’s interest, and following that up with a polished manuscript.

KARIN: The issue of privacy and personal ethics naturally often comes up. What do you say to someone who is afraid to share their story for fear of alienating family members, or worse, being sued?

BARBARA: Ah, we all worry about this. I don’t think we should write out of revenge, but if someone in your life has behaved badly and this is part of the story you’re telling, you own this experience. It’s your right to write what they said and did, letting them get nailed by their own actions and words. (No matter what, bear in mind that good writing is about generosity.) You have to believe that the story is worth whatever happens if published. Most people won’t be pleased with what you write about them, good or bad. Writers need to make their own boundaries when they write. My only boundary is not to write anything deeply personal about my children. Everyone else is fair game.

KARIN: Do you think a pseudonym is a good option?

BARBARA: Not unless there’s a really good reason and your publisher is okay with it. It’s important to remember as you write that no one will read this until you allow them to.

KARIN: Do you think fictionalizing is a good option?

BARBARA: No. I find the minute anyone starts to fictionalize a memoir, they get stuck and tangled up in what really happened. Fiction is a whole other talent. Writing fiction is to put on masks and veils and to feel free, living a whole other life in someone else’s skin. Of course in fiction you write about some of your own memories but you give them to someone else. On the other hand, one of my favorite novels is The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, whose protagonist has many characteristics of the author. But you need to be as talented as she is to pull it off.

KARIN: What would you say to someone who feels like they have a story in them to tell—to potentially publish—but don’t necessarily have a background as a writer?

BARBARA: I’d say give it a try. Take a class. Start writing down bits and pieces of it. Think of your story as a quilt—scenes/memories as square patches in your quilt. Or find a ghost writer. But first my advice would be to simply write down the story.




Buy the book!

To learn more about Barbara Abercrombie, visit her site.

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Barbara Abercrombie & Jacqueline Winspear

In conversation with Monica Holloway

Vroman's Bookstore

Thursday, November 5th

6 p.m. PST

via Zoom.

Register here

A Conversation with Hope Edelman

Over the years, I have developed a favorite tradition in the Unlocking Your Story workshops by inviting guest authors to visit the groups. I love cheerleading writers and their new books as they make their way into the world, and it's also a way to cultivate community, as I enjoy inviting back workshop alums for these events.

This fall we have two incredible women visiting the groups, both of whom have written books on the topic of grief and loss—a theme for the times, to be sure.

Hope Edelman, author eight nonfiction books including the #1 New York Times bestseller Motherless Daughters, is also a certified Martha Beck Life Coach specializing in grief, early loss, and creativity. She runs workshops and retreats to help motherless women revisit and reassess their early losses. Hope's new book, The Aftergrief, launches next week and explores what loss looks like 10, 20 or 30 years later.

Hope and I spoke at length about how to think about grief, especially against the backdrop of Covid-19. She shared her thoughts on how shifting our perspectives about our losses can help us grow, and how writing can be a great tool for this.

Barbara Abercrombie, also visiting this fall, is a longtime, beloved teacher at UCLA Extension Writers' Program, whose book The Language of Loss is coming out in November. Stay tuned for an interview with her next month!

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Photo: Hannah Kozak.

Hope Edelman is the author of eight nonfiction books, including the bestsellers Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers, and the memoir The Possibility of Everything. Her work has received a New York Times notable book of the year designation and a Pushcart Prize for creative nonfiction. She is also certified as a Martha Beck Certified Life Coach, and facilitates Motherless Daughters retreats and workshops all over the world. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Iowa City.

Her new book, The AfterGrief, explains that the death of a loved one isn’t something most of us get over, get past, put down, or move beyond. With guidance for reframing a story of loss, finding equilibrium within it, and even experiencing renewed growth and purpose in its wake, Hope demonstrates that though grief is a lifelong process, it doesn’t have to be a lifelong struggle.

KARIN: Congratulations, Hope! I know your new book took a while to birth.

HOPE: Thank you. It was four years in the making, which is a very long time, but it took me that long to do all the research I felt thoroughly conceptualized and articulated this way of thinking about grief. It just took that long to really know what I wanted to say. It takes as long as it takes.

KARIN: So, is the book much different than the way you originally pitched it?

HOPE: Yeah, very different.

KARIN: What did you know at the beginning, and what did you discover as you went along

HOPE: The book went through several iterations.

When I first started working on it, I was going to write kind of an all-purpose book about grief. I look back now at that proposal, and I was emphasizing post traumatic growth—looking at the positive outcomes of grief once we allow ourselves to grieve and the reasons why we may not have been able to grieve, especially if we were young when a loss occurred.

As I started doing interviews and talking with more people, I became so intrigued and dismayed by how many adults who were bereaved as children, who lost a parent or a sibling or a close friend, and didn't get support and all the ways that that was showing up in their lives later. So, the second iteration of the book was very much about adults bereaved as children.

Also, the 2016 election happened a few months after I sold my proposal. I started thinking about cultural responses to grief in a different way because half the country, as far as I could see, was in mourning, and portions of the other half were just saying, “You lost, get over it.” There was a sense of just get on with things, let go and move on, deal with it. That was so reminiscent of how many of these adults were told to cope with their grief when they were younger. It was an old school message, but it was pervasive in the culture for a couple of months. I mean, I saw it everywhere on social media and it really made me rethink what I wanted to write about and what was important to write about, and did the world really need another book about grief that talks about the long-term positive outcomes? There's so much already written about posttraumatic growth.

Then I started studying narrative therapy and doing more research and leading retreats. I saw that a lot of the long-term lingering effects were similar, regardless of what the age was at time of loss. As I got deeper into that research, I realized that what I was discovering was applicable to a much wider portion of the population, which was anyone who had a major loss in the past. What does that long arc of loss look like?

So, the third iteration of the book really became looking at the long arc of loss and what a major loss is bound to look like 5, 10, 20, 30 years later, and how it will recur. Grief will recur, but I didn't want to call it grief because it isn't the same thing that you feel in the first year or two after someone dies, when you're making all the adjustments and adaptations simultaneously with trying to figure out how to live in the world without this person and missing them and having the physical absence. What shows up 10, 20 years later, is really something very different, but I didn't know what to call it.

I was thinking what comes after grief? Then I realized, we're just going to call it The Aftergrief, because that is, I think, the phase of it. We've all been conditioned to think about five stages of grief. The bereavement world doesn't think in those terms anymore, but the general public very much does. Kübler-Ross's stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I think Kubler-Ross was a brilliant mind, but her work got co-opted in the direction that I don't think she ever intended for it to go in. She did a lot of good in the culture by getting people talking about death and loss, but when those five stages started being applied to bereavement, things really went awry culturally, I believe.

KARIN: Didn’t Kübler-Ross intend for her work to be applied to someone who is dying?

HOPE: Yeah, that's exactly right. Terminally ill patients. Those were the stages that she observed people going through as they came to terms with the imminent end of their own lives. Then it got applied to bereavement.

In my experience—and I've been doing this work now for more than 25 years primarily with women who've lost their mothers, but also with any adults who were bereaved as children, and also having the experience of having lost family members and close friends as an adult, and helping others navigate their losses as a grief coach—I believe that people really only care about two stages of grief: the stage where you feel really bad and the stage where you start feeling better.

I think of that as grief and the after grief. Grief is that stage where you feel really bad. You're dealing with sorrow and distress and despair and all of the physical symptoms of grief. Then the after grief is when you start feeling better and feeling that you've got the inner resolve and resilience and fortitude to move forward in your life. You'll miss that person and hopefully you'll find ways to carry them forward with you, but you can do it. For everyone, that transition is different. There's no morning where you wake up and say, “I'm in the after grief.” That doesn't happen.

KARIN: Is it common to transition back and forth between the two?

HOPE: Oh yeah, you can. In fact, there is a name for that. It's called the dual process model of bereavement. It was developed by two Dutch psychologists who observed in widows that it would move back and forth between focusing on the loss and focusing on the practicalities of life. They called it an oscillation.

Some people make that transition in a very discreet way. Some just feel it coming on gradually. Some can pinpoint the morning that they wake up and feel that this is the first morning I've woken up and feel a sense of hope about the future. For others it's a slower process. 

We phase into it a year after the loss, two years after the loss, six months after the loss. It depends on so many factors, including the relationship you had with that person, how dependent you were on your interactions with them, your temperament, your prior losses that you may or may not have had. And then I think it extends to the rest of your life. Because aspects of that loss may recur or bubble up for you. I think that the cultural message has been that if, 10 years after your mom or your dad or your sibling died, you reach a life transition and you powerfully miss them, that your grief was somehow incomplete. In fact, that was the belief in the psychoanalytic literature well into the '70s and '80s. I think the word that was used was unresolved or incomplete grief.

KARIN: Wow, that's amazing.

HOPE: Right. Whereas the number of people that I've encountered who say, “20 years after the loss, my first child was born and I found myself missing my mom or my dad all over again. Or 10 years after the loss, on my wedding day, I couldn't stop crying because I missed my sibling so much and wished that they were there.” I don't think that should be pathologized. I think it's actually a normative response. I don't like using the word normal because who's normal? What's normal, right? We're all so complex. But if I just look at it in terms of inductive reasoning, given how many people that have told me this story, I think it is on the scale of normative responses.

Now, if you're so crippled that you don't feel like you need to cancel your wedding because you can't show up, that's different.

KARIN: Right.

HOPE: That's an extreme response. But I have plenty of friends who say, “I had a big response as I approached and reached the age my parents were when they died.” That's a huge transition. I find that to be actually a really normative response, and so I'm looking to put this book out in the world so we start a conversation that validates and normalizes those responses.

KARIN: Is this relationship to grief unique to Western culture? Did you look at other cultures?

HOPE: I did. There's a whole chapter on that. It's that important, because grief is culturally relative. And this is something that we weren't really talking about much in the '90s when I first wrote Motherless Daughters. At that time, I was really focusing very much on, “Let’s look at all the common denominators because women feel so isolated; they want to know that others out there feel the same way. So, I'm going to look at the parts of this experience that transcends culture, race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic background.” But now there's a lot more appreciation for how all of those factors can determine a grief response.

I went deep into looking at how other cultures respond to grief and death because their belief systems tend to infuse death rituals and mourning practices, including, how long will you commemorate your dead? We look at Asian cultures that do ancestor worship or Latino cultures that come together every year for the Day of the Dead.

But yes, Western culture has done a particularly crappy job in helping us adjust to the loss of a loved one. It didn't used to be that way. What's remarkable, Karin, is that it's been just the past hundred years. One of the things that changed mourning practices in Western culture was the flu pandemic of 1918-19. And the fact that we are 100 years later experiencing something so similar is really serendipitous. I won't say coincidental, I think serendipitous.

KARIN: What happened 100 years ago?

HOPE: Three things happened in quick succession.

1914 to 1918 was World War I, which was the first technological warfare where lots of people died at once. For the first time, lots of people were dying far from home, so you couldn't bury your dead. They often had to be buried where they died.

So people didn't have graves to visit or funerals. That really was difficult because Victorian mourning practices tended to be elaborate, particularly in the UK and the Commonwealth, but also somewhat in the United States. We had very elaborately prescribed rituals for what to do after someone died and how long it lasts and mourning dress and how you decorated your house and there were social rules and what the women wore and for how long depended on who died. This all was also an effect of Queen Victoria, but mourning was a very social activity. 

And then in 1917, Sigmund Freud published the paper Mourning and Melancholia, and the psychoanalysts began thinking and researching grief as an individual internal process. We were also shifting from romanticism to modernism as a cultural movement and that was really important, too.

The third thing that happened was the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, right on the heels of World War I. So many people died between the war and the flu pandemic that the culture just couldn't keep up with those mourning rituals, because we were mourning two and three people at once. Sometimes a whole family would die from the pandemic and we couldn't gather for big funerals, and mourning periods would have overlapped, and people just started thinking of mourning as something now you do privately or alone, which I think really screwed us up because we're a tribal species. I don't think we were meant to have these intense, really painful emotions by ourselves and have to figure out how to get through them on our own and be told that if we didn't do it properly, that we were unresolved or incomplete. I mean, that really messed up the way we think about grief.

So now, 100 years later, we have not just the opportunity to hold onto what we have, which is minimal by comparison, but to improve upon it. I see some hopeful glimpses into that, that people aren't willing to just let go of funerals. That they're trying to create virtual memorials and the internet is a place where we can share our stories.

KARIN: I just recently attended an online memorial for a friend and was reminded of how important funerals are, even in this virtual form.

HOPE: Absolutely. Funerals, memorial services and particularly eulogies are some of the last social experiences that we have connected to losing someone where a community of mourners will come together and share their stories and comfort each other. Because think about it… after the funeral, or the wake if you're Catholic, or the Shiva if you're Jewish, what do we have? Then the families just have to do it themselves from that point forward. So if we lose that, then we're losing any kind of social interaction around our grief and any opportunity for culturally prescribed social support. It's critically important that we hold onto that somehow, and the internet, fortunately, has allowed us to do that.

KARIN: When you say, “I see hopeful glimpses?” is that what you're referring to?

HOPE: Yes. I'm part of a taskforce—a virtual funeral taskforce—which is made up of about 90 bereavement professionals. It's authors, activists and academics and people in the field who were meeting online through the first month of the COVID epidemic to share our different initiatives and try to cross pollinate and help each other, help the culture adapt to this new reality, be it temporary or parts of it permanent.

These virtual memorials allow people from out of state to attend. It used to be, if you couldn't get on an airplane on short notice, you couldn't take part in the service. But now people can and I think that's something we may not want to let go of. In the future, I hope we will see hybrids where we can gather socially again and people can come together and have the comfort of hugs and handshakes, but we can also livestream these events so that people from out of town who can't travel for physical or financial reasons can still be part of the day.

KARIN: Just to extend the COVID conversation, it is my understanding that the grief we're experiencing now is re-triggering old losses for many people.

HOPE: Yeah, that's exactly right.

I write about what I call new grief, old grief, and new old grief, and I'll just briefly explain what each of them is.

‘New grief’ is when you've just lost somebody and a lot of the response that you're having is related to that person's suffering and the loss of that relationship in the physical world—any sadness, anger, guilt, whatever emotions you're feeling around that loss. I call that new grief, the freshly acute phase. The shock, the numbness, the despair, the sleeplessness, all of that new grief.

‘Old grief’ is what I call a loss from the past that resurfaces in the present. That's what's getting re-triggered for a lot of people with COVID, and it's getting retriggered for all different reasons. It might be that you didn't get to say goodbye to a loved one who died in the past and now you're reading about all these families that can't be with their loved one when they die. It may be that you lost someone very suddenly and the fear of COVID coming on and taking a life very quickly is triggering some of those emotions.

Old grief may be triggered by a loss in the present, too. If you've lost someone freshly to COVID—or any other cause—and you're feeling new grief around that, it may re-trigger old grief from the past that you weren't able to process at the time because you either developmentally weren't mature enough or there was too much else going on or you didn't have support, didn't feel safe.

What I call ‘new old grief’ is when you experience your old loss in a new way, and that typically happens when you reach a milestone in your life that requires you to revisit that loss and see it differently—like a wedding or parenthood or divorce, for example. It also can be an age correspondence event where you turn the age someone was when they died or your child turns the age you were when somebody died. You're experiencing that old loss in a new way.

KARIN: Is that new way typically positive or could it go either way?

HOPE: It can go either way, but it typically has elements of both in my experience. There may be a renewed sadness; let's say for example, my mom was 42 when she died. So when I turned 42, I felt powerfully sad because I realized how young it was and how much she had missed out on. But I also felt this renewed gratitude for being here and being alive and getting to be 43 and 44 and 45. So you can have both of those experiences at once. They don't have to cancel each other out.

KARIN: Your book is described as showing us how shifting perspectives of grief can help us grow. How can we shift our perspective and can writing be a tool?

HOPE: Yeah, absolutely. I think of those shifts happening when we are willing to revisit and revise our stories. By revisit, I mean go back and look at the same set of facts. They probably don't look the same way they did when you experienced the loss, right?

I mean, I was 17 when my mom died. While I was writing this book, I unearthed a box of interviews and notes from Motherless Daughters, which I wrote in the early 1990s. In there I found a typed version of my story of my mother's death—five or six pages that I'd typed up when I was in my late 20s. I read this and I thought, “Wow, this is an artifact. This is an example of my story in motion because that's not the way I was telling the story at 17, and it's definitely not the way I'm telling the story now. This is a whole different version.”

So I could see the evolution of my relationship to the same set of facts, and that's what we're doing in the memoir workshop. We are encouraging people to go back. When you write the story of your life, you're revisiting the events and you're creating an artistic representation of them. But then your workshop cohorts are asking questions, and they're challenging you to really think about your interpretation of those events and articulate them in a way that offers something to your readers. So, I think of the memoir workshop as almost the best and purest example of revisiting and revising our stories. I think that's why we see such remarkable change in some of the students or some of the writers in the workshop because we're watching them develop new relationships with their stories, and that's how I think growth occurs.

I think what we're also seeing, and I was just thinking about this the other day, Karin, is that because of the cultural messages we have about grief and because there's such a cultural imperative to let go and move on and get over it, we're not always good at finding ways of maintaining relationships with our loved ones who died and finding ways for them to walk forward with us.

When we're writing a memoir about a loss, about someone we loved who has died, we are spending time with them again. If you're writing the book, you might be spending a couple of years with them again, and that often feels good to have them back, right? To have their presence surrounding us, which is why sometimes it's hard to finish those books. We have to be prepared that we're not letting go of them. I think there needs to be rituals for us, honestly, to let go of the shaping of that story and figure out how now we're going to carry these people forward differently.

You, like I do, I'm sure, have students who have been working on their books forever. Sometimes I wonder, is it because it feels so good to be in the presence of that person that they're writing about? How can we help them as instructors to find new and different ways to maintain that connection, but be able to bring the book to its conclusion and put it out into the world?

KARIN: Wow, I've never thought about that.

HOPE: No, me neither. That's the first time I've really articulated it that way.

KARIN: What about the students who are writing about loss and the painful parts?

HOPE: Well, that's hard, because it can reactivate trauma in their lives or in the classroom. Then we have to know when to gently encourage them to also have professional support while they're writing the book, because that's out of our wheelhouse and we shouldn't try to be their therapist in addition to their writing coach.

KARIN: Right.

HOPE: They may come with the impulse because they know that they need to start externalizing this. They can't keep it private and in silence anymore, but they may not be prepared for what starting to tell that story is going to involve. I mean, they might have flashbacks and recover memories that they haven't had before, and we want to make sure that they are emotionally protected and not in any danger, right?

Do you know the work of James Pennebaker?

KARIN: Yes, I have his books.

HOPE: Yeah, he's great. I figured you would.

Sometimes we have to assess, are you stable enough to tell this story now? I've actually had in the past a student or two where I've suggested that it might be really good for you to process this with a professional first, instead of trying to process it initially on the page. If you have extreme abuse in the past, for example, and memories are being recovered, I don't think it's advisable to try to heal yourself through just writing the story. I think you really need some professional assistance in order to cope with what might be coming up.

But what we do know, and from Pennebaker's work, is that expressive writing is the combination of writing about your thoughts and your feelings. If you're just venting your emotions on the page, it doesn't seem to have a beneficial effect. In fact, sometimes it makes you feel worse. If you're just writing at the surface, what you think about what happened and the episodic events, it's not really that beneficial either.

But it's that marriage of narration and reflection that makes a memoir really work, that also helps the writer heal. So, if we're seeing someone just venting their emotions on the page, we can guide them toward putting more of the episodic narrative through line in there so that they can work with both, and learn how to interpolate one with the other.

If we see somebody just writing the episodic version of events, which I find is more common in my workshop, the difficult first draft—this happened, that happened, this happened, that happened—then you start asking them questions about, “well, how were you feeling when this happened? What do you think about this?” Get them to integrate their thoughts and their feelings. Then I think we're really helping them heal in a way that writing becomes the catalyst, maybe not the end product.

KARIN: Thank you so much, Hope! This has been such a fascinating and enlightening conversation.

To get a sneak peek of The AfterGrief, to be released in October 2020, click here!




Buy the book!

To learn more about Hope Edelman, visit her site.

See all interviews

A Conversation with Caroline Leavitt

I'm thrilled to introduce you to Caroline Leavitt, a bestselling novelist whose 12th book With Or Without You is coming out through Algonquin in August. Caroline and I had a chance to talk about everything from Story Structure (which she teaches at Stanford and UCLA), to how she comes up with her story ideas, to how to stay the course as a career writer.

Caroline will be visiting the Unlocking Your Story summer workshop next week, zooming in from Hoboken, New Jersey!

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CAROLINE LEAVITT is the award-winning author of twelve novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Pictures of Youand Is This Tomorrow. Her essays and stories have been included in New York magazine, Psychology Today, More, Parenting, Redbook, and Salon. She is a book critic for People, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and she teaches writing online at Stanford and UCLA.

Her forthcoming novel, With Or Without You(Algonquin, August 2020), is a contemporary story of what happens to relationships as the people in them change, whether slowly or in one cataclysmic swoop.

“What if Snow White woke up and decided she didn’t much like Prince Charming? Something like that happens in Leavitt's latest novel... One character’s coma is only the first surprise in this satisfying story of middle-aged love.”STARRED Kirkus Review.

Also, Caroline's novel Pictures of You is being re-issued for its tenth anniversary edition. The story features two women running away from their marriages who collide on a foggy highway, killing one of them. The survivor, Isabelle, is left to pick up the pieces, not only of her own life, but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman, April, has left behind. Together, they try to solve the mystery of where April was running to, and why.

KARIN GUTMAN: What first strikes me is how prolific you are. Would you describe yourself this way?

CAROLINE LEAVITT: It's so funny to hear that because everybody says that I'm always working. I was brought up in a household where I was told I was lazy all the time. So I always think that I'm not working hard enough and I'm not doing enough and I need to do more and there's not enough time. So I guess the answer is, yes, I am prolific but, no, I don't think of myself as prolific.

KARIN: Can you tell us the story behind publishing your first novel Meeting Rozzie Halfway?

CAROLINE: Sure, absolutely. Listen, I had a really difficult childhood. I was asthmatic and bullied and I spent a lot of time in the library reading and writing stories and I always wanted to be a writer. I was always told, “No, that's really not a profession.” I had very traditional parents. “You can be a school teacher or you can be a nurse and, best of all, you can be a wife and mother.” I didn't listen and kept writing and writing and writing, and when I got out of college, I started sending out short stories and they always came back, rejection, rejection, rejection.

And then in my early 20s, I entered this contest called A Young Writers contest and the prize was that they would fly you to New York and you would get your piece published in Redbook Magazine. I figured, “Oh, I don't have a chance. I don't think I write Redbook stories,” which at the time was very traditional. So I sent in a story about two sisters growing up in Boston, one was mentally ill, and I won the first prize. I was so surprised. Not only did I win, but all of a sudden the story created all this buzz and within weeks I had an agent, and then I had an editor who wanted the story to be a novel and that's what started my publishing career.

I had never thought it was going to happen so soon, I just thought I was going to be publishing short stories for a while and paying my dues. But it didn't make my career run smoothly, which is one thing that I think is important for all writers to know, that a writing career is not up, up, up. It's always up and down and up and down. I had a big success with my first book. My second book was a lesser success, and then books three to eight just didn't sell. It got to the point where nobody knew who I was and I felt like a failure and my ninth book on submission was rejected as “books to be rejected.” They just didn't want it.

I thought that, well, after nine books if nobody who knows who you are, and you haven't built an audience, then your career is over. So, as I was trying to think of what to do, a friend of mine had an editor at Algonquin who was looking for material and she sent the book to them and they bought it. They turned it into a New York Times Bestseller its second week out and got it in six printings. So, I've learned that a writing career can go up and down all the time and you just have to persist and keep writing and remember that it's the writing that's important, not the publication.

KARIN: Was that Pictures of You?

CAROLINE: Pictures of You was the one that gave me my career.

KARIN: When you say that it “gave you your career,” what do you mean?

CAROLINE: To me it meant that I could continue writing and I would have readers, because when it became the Bestseller, I had zillions of readers and people reaching out to me and that was really gratifying that people were reading my work and responding to it. I knew that it didn't necessarily mean that the next book would do the same level or that they could not vanish just like my second novel did, but it gave me an understanding that what was important was telling the truth on the page and not worrying so much about what else was going on. Now I'm established—people know who I am—but I can still fail and to me that's okay, because I also know I can still succeed. I'm thinking about the business very differently now than I did when I started out.

KARIN: Do you think that Pictures of You is better than the other novels you’d written?

CAROLINE: That's a great question, and it's one that I really thought about. No, it's not that Pictures of You was suddenly different from every other book I had ever done, and I wouldn't necessarily say that Pictures of You was better than any of the books that I wrote before that. I think it was the publisher; I watched what Algonquin did and they do things that no other publisher has done before. I saw them physically reach out to people who were book reviewers and say, “Listen, you have to read this book,” and the person would say, “Yeah,” and they'd say, “No, no, no, listen, really, you really have to read this book.”

They really put their careers on the line for this particular book; whereas before, I never even had a publicist assigned to me for some of my books. So, I would say it was definitely the publishing company.

KARIN: Do you now feel partial to Algonquin?

CAROLINE: Oh, yeah. Algonquin is my home now. I already sold my fifth book with them, and I don't want to go any place else, because they've been fabulous to me and everybody knows everybody. I can call up the publisher, the head of the whole thing and say, “Let's have lunch,” and we'll go have lunch. All the editors know each other and they all know the authors and all the authors know each other, so it's really more of a family feeling.

I was at Grand Central and Saint Martin's, and it was a very different experience. I couldn't ask questions and I was not part of any of the marketing. There was no marketing. Also editorial wasn't as intense as it is with Algonquin where my editor and I slave over every page. There's a lot of collaboration going on and a lot of conversation going on and trust and it just feels like they truly care about the work that the writers are doing. To me, that makes so much difference.

KARIN: Looking back, would you have done anything differently during that period after your first book came out?

CAROLINE: Well, let's see, it was a period of 16 years of trying to make it and slogging around.

I didn't know anything. I was a different person than I am now. I was painfully shy. I was in a very unhappy first marriage. I would never think of asking anybody for help because I was afraid. If I was back in that period, I would reach out more to people. First of all, I had a different agent during those years, so I probably would have gotten a different agent sooner. I stayed with my first agent because I was afraid that I wouldn't get any other agent who would take me. So, I definitely would have been bolder about it.

KARIN: It’s hard to imagine you as shy, because I feel like you've such a generous, open-hearted spirit.

CAROLINE: Well, I had to learn to be that way. A lot of it was Algonquin, too, because I had all these books and nobody had ever sent me out on a tour and Algonquin did, and all of a sudden, I was in front of 200 to 900 people and I had to be personable. A friend of mine was a media coach and I said, “How do I do this? I'm so afraid,” and she worked with me and then I discovered that the more personable I got and the more relaxed I was, the better they liked me. They would laugh and afterwards people would come up and say, “I'm so glad you told that story about being bullied as a little girl because that happened to me, too, and now I feel less alone.”

I began to realize, “Oh, this is what it's about.” It's not about standing up there and saying, “This is what my book is and you should buy it.” It's more about saying, “I'm a human being, like you're a human being and this is what I've gone through, and I tried to put it into art by making this novel and I hope it's something you'll respond to.” And the more I did it, the easier it became and I turned myself into a non-shy person, which is kind of remarkable.

KARIN: That is amazing.

So Pictures of You was your first experience with Algonquin?

CAROLINE: Yes. I had heard of them, of course, but at that time, I just thought, “Well, they're a small prestigious literary publisher, they'd never want me,” and to my surprise, they did. I learned not to depend on anybody else to give me my self-worth as a writer. I always tell writers you have to find it in yourself. You have to really dig deep and find it in yourself and then other people will respond to that.

KARIN: And now you’ve got a new book coming out with them…

CAROLINE: Yeah, With or Without You, it's coming in August, and then I sold another one called Days of Wonder, which I have to write. They do this wonderful thing where you can send them the first 70 pages and if they like it, then they'll buy it. And then you have a year to write the book, so that's what I'm doing now.

KARIN: So, you sent the 70 pages and they liked it?

CAROLINE: Thank goodness, but that doesn't mean it's getting easier to write the rest, especially now during a pandemic. It's really hard.

KARIN: You're finding it harder to write?

CAROLINE: Yes, it's much, much harder to write because everything feels so surreal. Nobody's on the street. I usually would go out and see my friends; my husband and I would always go out into the city and do things. There's a kind of stasis feeling and every once in a while, I realize again what's going on in the world is so terrifying on so many counts, that I can't work, because I keep thinking, “What can I possibly write that's going to help anybody or help me?” Most of my writer friends say, “Well, the business of writing is to create empathy and that's something that people need and that they could use more of, so you should just put your head down and try to do your work,” but it's difficult. It's a difficult time now for everyone.

KARIN: Can you share what the new book is about?

CAROLINE: Yeah, I can actually. It's about this young woman in her 20s whose early release from prison for an attempted murder that she and boyfriend may or may not have done when they were 15 years old. Because her boyfriend was very wealthy and came from a prestigious family, he did not get sent to prison, but she did. So the book is about her struggling to rebuild her life, to try to find this guy, and find out what really happened that night, because she doesn't remember it. Also when she was sent to prison, she was pregnant with their child and the child was given away, so she's looking for that child also. That's all I know about it. I'm going to find out the rest as I write about it.

KARIN: How do your ideas come to be… how do you find your story? I know you often use your personal life experiences as springboards for your novels.

CAROLINE: Yes, usually it's about something that's been haunting me for a long time and I really don't know the answer to some question about it. For me a lot of it had to do with my family. I have an adored older sister and we were really close for 17 years of our life, and then her personality changed and she's become estranged from me, which is really painful. I've been writing about it and writing about it and I realized that the question for me was, “What did I do and how do I get to be forgiven?” because she's not giving me the answer. She's just telling me she doesn't want to speak to me.

I thought, “You know, I should write something about this,” and then I happened to be talking to a good friend of mine and she was telling me about this wonderful woman who has all these friends and everybody loves her. So, I met this woman and I did love her and I said, “Oh, she's such a great person.” That was when my friend told me, “You know, I didn't tell you this because I didn't want you to have any pre-judgment, but she went to prison when she was 15 for a murder she committed, and she spent her whole life trying to become a good person because of it and she succeeded.”

Those two ideas struck with me and I thought, “Oh, now I know what the novel is about. It's about this constant yearning feeling of when do I get to be forgiven, what do I have to do, mixed with that feeling of what did I do?” To me, being 15 is so interesting, because most of the time kids that age are runaway cars. Your emotions are all over the place. You're not thinking things out. I guess I'm writing it to find out how this woman is going to be forgiven—and how is she going to end up feeling that yes, she now deserves a place in the world and should she have been imprisoned at all. So that's how it all came about.

KARIN: Will you do research?

CAROLINE: I have actually. I have a friend who runs a prison program for women in Massachusetts where as part of their parole they have to read books and have discussions, and she asked if I would like to come to one of their meetings. I absolutely wanted to go. There were about 20 women there and they were not very friendly at first. They were very suspicious and they wanted to know why I was there and what I was doing and I was really honest with them. The interesting thing is they started to warm up when I told them that I had never learned how to drive a car and I told them, “I'm nervous being here with you, because I want to do you justice.”

And then they started opening up. I asked if I could interview them about their experiences in prison and one woman burst into tears and said, “I have to think about it.” Two other women said, “Yes, you can talk to me.” I had long conversations with them. What was so interesting to me was that some of them formed their first real steady friendships in prison. They felt they were protecting each other and there was a kind of community and I liked that. So there were a lot of those details that I used.

KARIN: What is your writing practice like?

CAROLINE:  Well, I have a deadline, which is really good, because it forces me to write. And also for my mental health, it's important for me to write.

For the next book I have the 70 pages I wrote a really detailed 30-page synopsis of what I thought might happen, which changes as I write. Every day I sit down at the desk around nine or ten and circle one part of the synopsis that I'm going to work on, just for the day. Maybe it's one or two scenes and that way it makes it seem more manageable to me. I don't feel so overwhelmed. I feel like, “Okay, I'm just going to do this part,” and it doesn't have to be chronological. Usually I can work for four hours and then I'm exhausted and I can't do it anymore. It's like the spark isn't there anymore.

Every day I try to do a little bit, even a paragraph and I used to be very consistent about this. Now with the pandemic, I'm not so consistent. Some days I wake up and I just feel depleted. I can't do it, and so I'll spend the day watching movies on my computer or I'll just take a walk with my husband or I'll read, or I'll teach my classes and do whatever else I need to do with the writers that I work with. It’s definitely not as consistent but I'm really trying. I'm struggling to get back to that because I need to, both because I have a deadline and because I know it feeds me. It's going to make me feel better.

KARIN: Do you adjust the synopsis as you’re writing?

CAROLINE: Yes, what happens with the synopsis is I'll write it out so I can convince myself I know how to tell a story—that I have beginning, a middle and a satisfying end—and then as I'm writing, of course, I'm making new discoveries so I have to throw things out and then I have to add things and everything changes. I re-jigger the synopsis all the time. I will go back and say, “No, now this particular thing can't happen. It doesn't make sense.” So, I'm going to have this other thing happen and it will usually change anywhere from 10 to 20 times as I'm working on the book.

KARIN: Interesting.

You teach story structure, right?

CAROLINE: I do. I teach story structure online, at both Stanford and UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. I have anywhere from 12 to 20 students in each class and it's 10 weeks and it's really intensive and most of it is online but every week we have a Zoom class so we can all see each other and talk and know each other. It's really, really fun.

KARIN: How do you go about teaching structure?

CAROLINE: I didn't learn about it myself until about eight years ago when one of my students actually said, “Do you know about John Truby's story structure?” At that time, I was the kind of person who felt, “No, I believe in creativity and the muse and I don't believe in any kind of formulas.” And she said, “This isn't a formula. Just listen to this.” She gave me these tapes and I listened and I was amazed. I was amazed because he doesn't give you a formula as much as he gives you an idea of the bones that every story should have.

Like every story should have a character who desperately wants something and out of that want comes action. So that's always a first step that I tell my students. You have to have a character who wants something and you have to know that there are stakes to it—like if he doesn't get this, what is going to happen that he won't like? And what does he have to give up to get what he wants? I also tell them that you can't always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes you get what you need.

I tell people that at the end, in terms of structure, you want the character ideally to have some kind of self-revelation where they realize, “Ah, I've spent my whole life trying to be rich and have a trophy partner and I struggled and I got those things, and then I realized, I'm not happy and now I realize that what I really need to do is quit that stupid job and go to the woods and be a gardener,” and then they do. It's that kind of change and realization that makes for a satisfying story.

So I give them beats of things that they should have, and every week we split it up and we'll talk about it. Like what's the moral choice? How could we make it deeper? What does a character want? Does it have big enough stakes and if not, how can we make it bigger? There's all kinds of toolbox stuff and I tell the writers, “Look, this is just a toolbox, and you can pick and choose the tools you want and you may find that you are the kind of writer who can't use any of these tools. That you just like riding on the seat of your pants and if that's you, that's fabulous, that's fine.”

KARIN: Everything you’re saying really resonates with me.

CAROLINE: Oh, I'm so glad.

KARIN: So, you give John Truby a lot of credit…

CAROLINE: Yeah, he changed my writing life. I don't agree with everything that he says, but I think he's on the money about the seven beats that you need.

KARIN: Did his approach to structure really change how you write?

CAROLINE: Yup. I used to write novels that would come out to be 800 pages, and I'd turn them into my agent and she'd say, “I can't send this out." She'd read it and say, "Let's try to figure out what the real story is and pare it down.” We'd do it that way.

There was much more hysteria in the process for me, because I never really knew what I was doing and I would go off on all these tangents and nothing would happen and characters wouldn't change. As soon as I learned story structure, it became so much easier because then I figured, “Oh, of course, this character has to do this and this should happen and we can go deeper here.” I just feel more in control. I tell my students, “It's like if you can think of a human being, every person on the planet looks different, feels different, acts differently, but we all have basically the same skeleton and that holds us up.”

Story structure is like your skeleton. Get the skeleton down and then you can add whatever kind of flesh and clothing and personality that you want, but it's the skeleton that's so important.

KARIN: Yes, I love how you talk about it.

You used the term “moral choice.” I've never heard of that. What does it mean?

CAROLINE: Oh, this is great, you'll love this. A moral choice is not about morality as much as what kind of person you are. It's putting your character between two terrible choices and what the character does tells you what kind of person he is—like say there's a guy, and his wife is dying of this terrible rare disease. There is a cure, and it's owned by one pharmacist. So the guy goes to the pharmacist and says, “I really need to buy this medicine,” and the pharmacist says, “Well, the medicine is going to cost $10,000,” and the guy says, “I don't have the money, please give it to me. It's the only thing that'll save her.” And the pharmacist says, “No, I'm sorry, it's $10,000.”

So the moral choice is… the guy can either say, “Well, I have to find another way, because I'm not going to get this drug from this pharmacist. He won't let me and the stakes are really high, and my wife might die.” Or he can say to the pharmacist, “You are inhumane,” and kill the pharmacist and steal the drug and save his wife. But in saving his wife, then he's going to jail, because he killed the pharmacist. So, when you have those two highly dramatic things, you put people reading in a position saying, “Oh, my God, what would I do?”

I always tell them about Jaws. You have the Sheriff. Is he going to close the beach and protect all the people and the town will ruin and he'll lose his job? Or is he going to keep the beach open and he'll keep his job and hope for the best? But meanwhile people could be eaten by the shark. The more of those kinds of choices you can give your character, the better.

KARIN: Meanwhile, tell us about your new book!

CAROLINE: With or Without You.

KARIN: I was fascinated by your recent essay in the Daily Beast that describes how you wrote TWO novels related to your real-life experience of being in a coma.

CAROLINE: Right, I got critically ill after the birth of my son with a mystery illness, so I was put into a medical coma for two weeks and I was sick for a year. The problem was that they gave me memory blockers so I wouldn't remember the pain and procedures, so my mind didn't remember any of this but my body did and I had all these post-traumatic triggers. So I was talking to a friend of mine who was a psychiatrist and he said, “You know, when you hypnotize a person and you tell them that they're burning, their skin can flame up. They can get blisters. The brain doesn't know the difference.” And he said, “You do that in your writings… why don't you just write about it and you'll heal yourself that way.”

So I wrote this book right after my coma that was called Coming Back to Me, which was about a woman like me who had been in a coma after she had a baby and she didn't remember anything. I thought it was going to make me lose these triggers and it didn't. I still kept having them. I was afraid to go to sleep and certain smells and certain colors would really upset me and none of the people who had been around me when I was in a coma wanted to talk about it, because it had been so traumatizing for them, too. So, I began to think, “Well, what if I wrote a book about a woman whose experience was different from mine? What if I wrote about a woman who remembered everything? Maybe then I could heal.”

So I created the character of Stella, who is aware of everything in her coma and outside of her coma. In fact, I made her better when she got out of her coma because she has a different personality, which does happen. She also has this extraordinarily miraculous new talent where she can paint really well and she can paint the inner lives of her subject. I did a lot of research and actually that's something that does happen in coma. People do awake with these astonishing new abilities.

KARIN: Wow.

CAROLINE: Suddenly they can speak a foreign language or suddenly they can be a virtuoso on the violin. I found that so fascinating and I wanted to write about that. So, the book is a lot about how we can re-make ourselves and what this does to the people who love us when we change, and what it does to our feelings towards the people we love.

KARIN: Have you noticed any shifts as a result of writing this second novel?

CAROLINE: Yeah, I have. I'm not bothered by colors or sounds or smells anymore. I still get unnerved when it's time to go to sleep, but I definitely feel free of the whole issue of coma. I think I will never have to write about it again, which is a nice thing to realize.

KARIN: Are there any promotional book events coming up that we can attend?

CAROLINE: Well, you can go to my website, www.carolineleavitt.com. There's a list of 30 different virtual events—some of them are with wonderful other authors that I'll be in conversation with. I know money is tight in the pandemic, but just calling your local library and asking them to order the book is a very big deal.

KARIN: Thank you, I will do that!

Caroline Leavitt is hosting the weekly Reedsy Prompts contest on July 24th! Each Friday, Reedsy posts five new writing prompts, and then challenges writers to submit a short story inspired by one of those prompts. A weekly winner receives $50 and is featured on the Reedsy site.

Caroline will be doing a “Reversals” theme. Here's a sneak preview of one of her writing prompts: “Every year one person is chosen to go to the moon, and this year, though you hid in terror, it is your turn to enter the rocket.”

To learn more about Caroline Leavitt, visit her website.

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