A Conversation with Sari Botton

There are a few women on my radar who are spearheading a reinvention of the way we talk about personal narrative and memoir—and Sari Botton is one of them. She is a seasoned editor and the author of the memoir And You May Find Yourself... Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo.

In our conversation below, we discuss everything from the ethics of memoir and how to navigate writing about other people to how different editors define what an essay is. She raises some revolutionary points about owning our stories and the kind of language we permit ourselves to use in describing them.

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SARI BOTTON is the author of the memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself...Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. She is a contributing editor and columnist at Catapult, the former Essays Editor for Longreads, and a former columnist for the Rumpus, where she interviewed established and new writers from Cheryl Strayed to Samantha Irby.

Sari edited the New York Times-bestselling Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Village Voice, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, More, and the Rumpus.

In addition to teaching creative nonfiction at Bay Path University and Catapult, Sari is the publisher and editor of three Substack publications: Oldster Magazine, Adventures in Journalism, and Memoir Monday

KARIN GUTMAN: You’ve written about how you’ve navigated writing about other people, as well as interviewing authors about this thorny topic in your Rumpus column Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me.
 
How did you handle this issue with your memoir And You May Find Yourself?
 
SARI BOTTON: When it came time to actually write my book, I realized I needed to first write a vomit draft, what I call a ‘warts and all’ vomit draft with everything in it. All the bad stuff. And then once it was out of my body, out of my head on the page, only then could I blur, subtract and edit.
 
I did it. I handed in the book. That book was edited.
 
And then I went back to my editor, and I said, You know what? I have to do that again. I’ve got to do another level of extraction. I said, I'm not going to get to publish my book in 2021. It's going to be 2022. And she said, Fine. So, I went back and scrubbed it of any unnecessary, inflammatory details. I further blurred people. 
 
KARIN:  Do you feel like these changes diluted the story at all?
 
SARI:  It's still to me all true. I changed so many identifying characteristics. I really did my best to make it so that if one of these awful people who I dated read it, they'd know it was them but nobody else would know unless they already knew the story. I tended to only change your name if you were a jerk. I showed the people I care about the pieces they were in, and said, Is this okay with you? How do you want me to refer to you? Do you want me to change your name?
 
KARIN:  The ethics of memoir are deeply personal. Given how challenging these lines are for you, did you ever consider fictionalizing your story?
 
SARI:  You should write fiction because you're interested in fiction and the art and mechanics of it, not because you're trying to avoid getting in trouble for writing about your life. People will see right through that. I have an idea for a novel and a list of ideas for short stories. But I want to do those things because I want to play God with characters who do interesting things, not because I want to write a story about my relationship with people in my life in a way that they will not recognize themselves, because that's impossible.
 
KARIN:  What about a pseudonym?
 
SARI:  I created a pseudonym for myself. She has a Gmail and a Twitter account. There were a few reasons I didn't publish under that name. One is that I would be really pissed off; I have spent more than 30 years building my platform. For me to then have to hide behind a pseudonym and build that pseudonym’s platform… I wasn't up for that. There’s just something about needing to own my personal story.
 
KARIN:  Can you give an example of how you handled some of the more incendiary material?
 
SARI:  There's a piece in the book about my struggle with body image and weight and eating disorders. In the ‘warts and all’ vomit draft version, a relative makes a comment on my butt when I'm seven, and it completely traumatizes me.
 
I revised that chapter to say that “the adults around me” were really to blame. I realized that my babysitters were on diets. My teachers were on diets and made comments about their bodies and other kids’ bodies. My aunts, my uncles. My grandparents were on the Pritikin Diet, and we all knew about it. It really was the culture. 
 
So, I pulled back on my book to the point where I could make the stories, especially the most difficult ones, about cultural phenomena. Yeah, that relative was a big part of it, but it wasn't necessary for this particular story.
 
KARIN:  In the introduction you write that the purpose of this book is to say simply, “I was here, I lived.” I found that refreshing.
 
You also refer to the series of essays as “confessional” which I find can be used to describe memoir in a derogatory way. What does that word mean to you?
 
SARI:  A lot of the rules of memoir, and of all writing, were written by straight white men.
 
I just read one of Annie Ernaux’s books, and it was 60 pages. She calls herself an “Ethnographer of the Self.” I love that she won the Nobel Prize for that work, and I am all for ethnography of the self.
 
I think we need to be rewriting all the rules of all writing, including memoir and essays. I reject the idea that you can't be a victim. Roxane Gay has written about this in her memoir, Hunger: “It took a long time, but I prefer 'victim' to 'survivor' now. I don't want to diminish the gravity of what happened. I don't want to pretend I'm on some triumphant, uplifting journey. I don't want to pretend that everything is okay. I'm living with what happened, moving forward without forgetting, moving forward without pretending I am unscarred.”
 
I just had an argument the other day with a writer whom I love. She says, “There are no victims in essay and memoir.” I was like, “Yeah, we're rewriting those rules. I mean, there are victims.” 
 
I was in a writing group with some people and I stopped being in the writing group, because I wrote a story about something that happened to me when I was seven. And someone said, “You sound like a victim.” And then someone else was like, “Yeah, you don't want to sound like a victim.” I said, “I was seven. I was a victim.” Bullies have made all the rules. Bullies don't want to read victimization stories, but other victims do. 
 
When I was at Longreads, I wrote a blog post about how Elizabeth Wurtzel made it okay to write ‘Ouch’. I feel very strongly that when you've been hurt, it's okay to write ‘Ouch’. I hate false bravado.
 
I also like confessions. The reason I chose to call these confessions instead of essays is because some of the pieces in the book don't really rise to the standards of an essay collection. This is a memoir in episodes, in vignettes. I'm confessing to things that I haven't been allowed to say, that I've wanted to say, that aren't all flattering. And so, I call them confessions.
 
KARIN: You have devoted your career to personal narrative, both as a writer and as an editor.
 
SARI:  It's absolutely true. I've been involved in this since 1991.
 
KARIN:  You’ve been witness to the whole trajectory since the memoir boom of the 90s. Where do you think things are headed? 
 
SARI:  Early on, there was Prozac Nation. There was The Liar's Club. There was Angela's Ashes. There was The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison's memoir about her affair with her father. That was the beginning of the 90s memoir boom. 
 
It's been a boom bust, boom bust kind of thing.
 
Where it's headed is more previously marginalized voices are being shared. I've noticed a lot of memoirs that are written in fragments. Maggie Smith has one coming out. She's a poet. Abigail Thomas writes in fragments. It feels like she's always been writing in fragments from her first memoir, Safekeeping.
 
I tend to think unless your memoir is about a very specific turn of events, a straight narrative can be really boring because the connective tissue in between the important points in your life can make it blah.
 
I'm just finishing this memoir, which I absolutely love by Kimberly Harrington, But You Seemed So Happy. It's about the dissolution of her marriage. She alternates personal essays with humor essays, like she would have in McSweeney's or Shouts and Murmurs in the New Yorker. It's all about her marriage, but it's broken up. I've been more drawn toward episodic memoirs.
 
KARIN:  More like a memoir-in-essays?
 
SARI:  Yes. The ‘essay’ term is very broad. I have a larger understanding of what a personal essay is, but there are people who are sticklers.
 
KARIN:  What does it mean to fit the standards of an essay?
 
SARI:  I've worked with colleagues who feel very strongly that a personal essay needs to have a real argument in it.
 
KARIN:  What does that mean exactly?
 
SARI:  You're making a point with the essay, you're not just telling a story. I like to let the reader figure out what the point is. A lot of publications require an essay to have at its center an argument that you then back up with data and sources, even if it's just a very personal story.
 
I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about when I got hit by a car. I was so stunned that people in New York were so helpful to me. The editors wanted me to bring in another instance in which somebody was hit by a car and not treated the same way as me. Also, to bring in statistics. Now that's an op-ed which is a different kind of essay, but there are editors at a lot of publications that want you to do that. With a personal essay, they want you to use your anecdote to illustrate a point. By my standards, the pieces in my book are personal essays, but again, I have a much broader definition than some editors.
 
KARIN:  What about Modern Love?
 
SARI:  I think they look for the Modern Love piece to really have a point at the center of it, even if it's not spelled out. Whereas some of mine are more like light anecdotes.
 
KARIN:  But I imagine that you, as an editor of essays, would want to know Why are you telling me this?
 
SARI:  That has to be inherent, but it doesn't have to be spelled out.
 
KARIN:  What is the difference between a long-form essay and a shorter form essay? Other than the length?
 
SARI:  My second Modern Love is 1,500 or 1,600 words, but there's a 5,000-word version of it in the book. I first wrote the 5,000-word version long before I had a book deal. I struggled to sell it and then I thought, I’ll try and do a Modern Love version. I did, and I sold it.
 
Some of it has to do with where you want to publish it. A great exercise is to have different versions of your piece that can go in different places and also amplify different aspects of the same story. 
 
It's harder to publish long-form right now. There are fewer and fewer venues. These days, Longreads is primarily a curation site with occasional long-form personal essays; where I used to publish three a week, they're now publishing maybe one a month. And Catapult just folded. It's hard to publish a 5,000-word essay, unless it's in your book. So, it might be worth your while to come up with a 1,200-word version for the Washington Post or the Huffington Post—a shorter version that could maybe even help you get a book deal, and then you put the longer version in the book.
 
KARIN:  What is your advice to writers who have a story they’re feeling reluctant to tell?
 
SARI:  I encourage you to write the version that you can't publish first. There's something valuable in getting it out of your head and out of your body. Something happens when it's a secret in your body, you don't have any perspective on it. And you can't until you get it out of your body and onto the page where you can see it. 
 
Then once it’s out of your body, take a break from it. Give yourself a couple of weeks, then come back to it. Let yourself have the experience of having it out of your body. There's something that happens in that early draft, some kind of neurological thing that permits you to gain perspective, that you can't have when it's just this thing you're not allowed to tell.



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To learn more about Sari Botton visit her site.

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Oldster Magazine explores what it means to travel through time in a human body—of any gender, at every phase of life. It focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly we experience with each milestone, starting early in life. It’s about the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures.

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Adventures in Journalism features the highlights and lowlights* (*mostly lowlights) from one Gen X lady writer's rather circuitous career path.

Looking for a quick route toward success as a writer? Allow Sari Botton to demonstrate what not to do, over the course of 30-plus hilarity-(in hindsight)-filled years.

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Each week, the editors of certain literary publications select their very favorite new personal essay or memoir piece, and you can find them all collected in the Memoir Monday newsletter—along with details about upcoming readings.

Inside features: First Person Singular features original published essays, and The Lit Lab offers perspectives on craft, publishing, publicity, and more.

A Conversation with Mary Laura Philpott

Below you’ll find my interview with Nashville author Mary Laura Philpott, whose memoir Bomb Shelter (which she calls a "domestic memoir") hit the shelves in April. She shares about how the pandemic revealed some new insights about her working habits, how she approaches essay writing, and how the emotional plot informs a story's structure. She also talks about her personal ethics when it comes to writing about her family.

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MARY LAURA PHILPOTT, nationally bestselling author of I Miss You When I Blink and Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives, writes about the overlap of the absurd and the profound in everyday life. Her writing has been featured by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among many other publications. A former bookseller, she also hosted an interview program on Nashville Public Television for several years. Mary Laura lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her family.

A lifelong worrier, Philpott always kept an eye out for danger, a habit that only intensified when she became a parent. But she looked on the bright side, too, believing that as long as she cared enough, she could keep her loved ones safe.

Then, in the dark of one quiet, pre-dawn morning, she woke abruptly to a terrible sound--and found her teenage son unconscious on the floor. In the aftermath of a crisis that darkened her signature sunny spirit, she wondered: If this happened, what else could happen? And how do any of us keep going when we can't know for sure what's coming next?

KARIN GUTMAN: You wrote Bomb Shelter during the pandemic. What was that experience like for you?

MARY LAURA PHILPOTT: Well, you know, everything fell away. All of a sudden, I had these very long, uninterrupted work days to write and I've never had that before. Kind of on purpose. I used to think that I did my best work when I was multitasking. For 40 something years I actually thought, I am at my best when I'm juggling a whole bunch of jobs. And then when the pandemic made me stop juggling, and I had just this project every day and I was staying immersed in it from day into night and into the next day—oh my gosh—I found out I was wrong. I actually do much better work when I'm immersed in one thing. I don't know how I'm ever going to replicate that again in my life. I might have to just pretend there's a pandemic. That was some self-discovery for me.

KARIN: What did you learn?

MARY LAURA: When you are really in the flow of a project, and it's going well, and you're having a good writing day, it's like you have fully transported to go live within the walls of that world. And then you have to put it away and go back to real life and you're in your kitchen or your actual office of your day job or you're in your car driving to the grocery store, whatever. The real world comes back in, and then you have to make time to dig all the way back down to that tunnel of where your work lives. When I had that uninterrupted time, I was able to stay in it. I wasn't getting out and then going back into it. I was wasting a lot less time walking myself back to the headspace of that project.

But I can only write from after breakfast until one or two o'clock. That's a good, long day if I can write to one or two. But then I still had all these hours to fill being quiet staying out of everyone's way. So, I started what I called “afternoon story school” where I read every day, with the intention of absorbing tricks and tools and techniques that I could apply to the book I was working on. So reading with a pencil in my hand. I can write an essay with one hand tied behind my back, but I wanted Bomb Shelter to read like a memoir. I wanted people to get the same satisfaction that you would get out of a novel that has drama and humor and dialogue, and you know, all the elements of story.

I had my mom's voice in my head. One time she called me, and she was like, “What should I read?” I started naming memoirs and she said, “I don't want a memoir. I want a story.” And I thought, that's a perception people have that memoir is not a story and I'm going to make this one just as satisfying as a novel. So I read thrillers, I read romance. I was really just studying, Okay, how does good dialogue work? How does pacing work in a story? How do you expand and contract the pacing to make people's hearts race or make them want to turn the next page? And then before I went to bed, I would inevitably have one or two thoughts like, Oh, I know what I want to do. So every night I would send myself an email with the subject line “book.” Then the next day I would open my email and there were the ideas I wanted to start with.

KARIN: How did the premise for the book come about?

When I had finished with the first chunk of book tour for I Miss You When I Blink, I remember thinking: I have no more ideas. I have nothing else to write about. I will never write another book. I've had my last good idea. I hope everyone enjoyed it. It's over. Meanwhile, everything that I write about in Bomb Shelter had happened. It was all right there. But I was like, Nope, I got nothing, we're gonna get a different job now.

Once I had mentally closed the lifecycle of I Miss You When I Blink, my brain finally was like, Oh hey, you can think about something else. And then all this stuff came pouring in, all these stories. A lot of Bomb Shelter is about this two-year period of my life after I found my son unconscious, and we realized he had epilepsy. Everything that had been stable in my life destabilized. And so, I had this period of trying to figure out: how do I either re-stabilize everything or figure out how to move on and live in an unstable world?

So I'm curious… I have no idea what my next book could be. But I do at least have a tiny bit of faith that something will come to me because it did last time. We'll see.

KARIN: It’s important to trust the ebb and flow of the creative process.

MARY LAURA: I keep getting asked, Was it easier to write a second book? No, unfortunately, sadly, it is difficult. It's very hard every time, but once you've lived through the whole lifecycle of one book, it does give you faith in the hard parts of the lifecycle on the next one. When you're like, I am 30,000 words into this and I'm going to have to throw it all away. I am a fraud. I should never have thought I could do this. Oh my God, I need a new job. It gives you faith when you're in those moments that, Oh yeah, this is the part where I think I can’t do this. This lasts like three weeks, and then I'm going to come out on the other side.

KARIN: Did you ever hit a stuck point while writing Bomb Shelter?

MARY LAURA: Oh several. More than I can count.

KARIN: How did you handle it?

MARY LAURA: If you're doing a book-length project, you have to think about a big picture sometimes in order to put the little pieces in place. Where's my narrative arc? To remind yourself, Wait, what's the big question I'm trying to answer? What's my big theme? But if I stayed in that big-picture-land for too long, I would get overwhelmed. So it would help me in those moments to kind of be like, Okay, no more big picture. Back to, What am I working on today? Let's look at this paragraph. Today I'm wrestling with this paragraph. If I can wrestle it to the ground by the end of my work day, I'm good. It's kind of like meditation, that centering. Looking at the step in front of you.

KARIN: You refer to the book as a “Memoir in Essays.” Why that term?

MARY LAURA: The way I think about memoir and essays and everything in between is a spectrum. On one side you've got essay collection—you have compiled a bunch of pieces and they are all linked by something, either they're all on the same topic or the same theme or they all take place in the same place. Over here, you've got memoir, a story that almost reads like a novel except it was something that was true. It's one big story. A memoir in essays could be anything in between.

I think of my two books a little bit differently on that spectrum. I Miss You When I Blink is a memoir in essays, but it's definitely an essay collection. You could pick it up, flip to the middle and start any essay and not be confused. There's not one main story going start to finish that you're going to get lost on. It is indeed coded as an essay collection. I think of it that way because the link is a little looser. There's a thematic link to those essays, but not necessarily a narrative thread straight through.

I think of Bomb Shelter as a memoir. It is built out of essay-like chapters. Anytime you give me 2000 words to write something, it's going to be shaped like an essay, because that is just what I do. It's what I've done my whole life. But it is coded as a memoir. You wouldn't want to pick it up and flip to page 150 and start reading there, that wouldn't make any sense at all. You need to read it start to finish.

The idea of a memoir in essays can sound very tempting to a writer who is in the early stages of a project, because it sounds like a way out of having to figure out your main thematic question and how all these pieces relate.

With I Miss You When I Blink, I was at that point where I had a bunch of essays. I made myself try to figure out the order of the essays, which I did by spreading them out all over my living room floor and taking a pair of scissors and literally cutting them into pieces. It was then that I figured out, Okay, there's a little bit of a thematic thread starting to come together here and I need to follow that and complete this book with essays that actually address that theme. In that book, it's very much about my 30s, the time where the momentum of early adulthood had started to slow and I finally had time to look up and around at my life and go, Well, this is not really where I meant to be. How do I start over without blowing my whole life up? And once I saw this emotional plotline that I had created on the floor, I could see where the gaps were. I could see, Oh, I have neglected to tell the dark night of the soul part, you know, I need a couple of essays that show what this was like at its worst.

Bomb Shelter fell into a more natural order because I was telling a story that began within a certain incident. I knew where it was going to land. I knew that that story thread that would keep you turning pages would also enable us to take some digressions into other stories and other essays. I did still end up spreading it out all over the floor, though, just because when I can see something physically in front of me, I can picture that that that graph of the highs and lows. And I'm a big believer that structure is story—the order you put chapters or essays in actually determines the story you're telling. If I moved a different essay to the beginning, it would be a whole different book because everything that comes after is answering that question or responding to that thing.

KARIN: How do you think about plot when writing memoir?

MARY LAURA: The emotional plot and the events you're writing about are not same thing. One thing I learned from reading thrillers and murder mysteries is: the events are the plot.

In a memoir, or at least in the kind I write, the plot is:

Once upon a time there was a woman who loved having a sense of control and that made her feel peaceful and happy. She believed that if she just loved everybody in her life enough, they would all be safe. And then one day, her world is turned upside down because this unforeseen, horrific thing happened. She has to figure out, Can I regain control of everything by loving everyone hard enough, or if that's impossible and my whole worldview is built on a misperception, how do I find my way back to peace and happiness?

That's an emotional plot that I can then tack different events to.

KARIN: Do you think about what’s saleable when you’re writing?

MARY LAURA: Anybody has a disadvantage if you're not writing whatever the hot thing is. Right now, the hot thing is romance. If you can write a book with some steamy sex scenes, maybe with a monster also, you're gonna make a million bucks. It's great.

The quiet domestic memoir about an internal world is not the hot thing. However, I'm a big believer that you can trust readers. I've been a reader of real-life memoirs about ordinary people. I love them. I think when they're done really well, when the author can give you what feels like a good story and also gives you words for what the human experience feels like so that you as a reader come away going—That's what I feel like, oh my gosh, it's such a relief to have words for that—I do think people buy that. I know that I crave that kind of book. I go looking for it in a bookstore, so I believe it is real. There probably are publishers who have no interest in that. But I found publishers who are.

I try not to think too hard about “Will this sell? and “What category is it?” because first and foremost, you've got to tell a good story.

KARIN: You say you are an essayist at heart. What tips do you have for writing a good essay?

MARY LAURA: Yeah, I love a good essay. I love the constraints of it. You've got 2,000 words to wrestle with this question or idea or story and you've got to land somewhere at the end. You can’t wander all over the place. It makes you be efficient. It's also a nice way to get a little bit of instant gratification. You think about how long it takes to get any kind of gratification on a book. At least if you sell one piece at a time, it's like, Yay, something that other people can see, so they know I have a real job!

Most of the time, when I'm giving feedback on an essay, it's about finding that emotional thread or plot and figuring out—What is the character looking for? Or what was their big misperception that changed? Or what did they want, that they either got or didn't get? And how did that change them?

Every now and then I'll read something where that plot has been lost. It’s like, these are beautiful sentences and this is an amazing thing that happened, but I haven't gone anywhere with that character by the end. They haven't changed. So, why did I read this?

KARIN: Do you think of the stakes of a story when you write?

MARY LAURA: I do, but I'm also a big believer that what look like low stakes can be high stakes, if they matter in that emotional plot. As I was saying earlier, I love to read memoirs about ordinary people just surviving life, as we all know it. I also do love a good memoir about escaping from a cult or pulling off a heist, I'm totally on board with that. Those are books where the stakes are obviously very high. Either you escaped with the bag of money or the cops shoot you and you're dead. The stakes may not seem as high in a book about, Something came along that threatened my family but then they were okay. Kind of looks like everything's okay from the outside. But actually, I—this “me” character—I'm forever changed. I will never be able to go back to the way I was. So, I'm either stuck here trying to go backwards, or I've got to figure out how to go forward and find peace again. That's high stakes. It's a suffer or find peace, which we’re all going through on some level.

KARIN: Do you typically know what you’re writing about in the early stages of a project?

MARY LAURA: I usually do think I know what I'm writing about. I think, Oh, I'm gonna tell you this story as a way of proving this point. Often what happens is, while I'm telling that story and digging down into the emotional core of each scene, I realize, Oh, I'm making a whole different point than I thought I was. Very often an essay ends in an utterly different place than where I thought it would. It's that digging down within each scene to find the right emotional language. Asking myself, Okay, what was my motivation here? What was I really feeling? As I do that, from scene to scene, it builds that emotional plot. I learn a lot about myself through writing, through questioning my emotions and motivations in particular scenes.

KARIN: How do you handle the ethics of memoir and writing about your family?

MARY LAURA: It’s been my practice until now that I only write my own story. I'm not here to write anybody else's story. So, if I'm trying to tell you a story, and it includes an experience that I’ve had that overlaps with someone else's experience, I'll just leave that experience out if possible. But if I need to tell the story, I just leave them out and I tell you my part. That works 90% of the time.

For Bomb Shelter, I needed you to feel everything I felt in that moment when I heard a noise at 4am and I woke up and I went to investigate and I found my son unconscious on the bathroom floor. I needed to give you what that day looked and felt like. However, I don't need to give you what that day looked and felt like to him. It's not a “Once upon a time, there was a boy and this happened to him.” It was “Once upon a time, there was a mother and here's what she experienced.”

And then I put other guardrails in place. I don't develop my family members as full characters. Except my husband because he's my character foil in a lot of stories. All you need to know about my children is enough to inform the scenes that move my character forward.

That’s how I negotiated those boundaries. It is different for every writer. It's different for every project. It's different for every motive. People write books for different reasons. I don't write books as a way of writing a letter to my loved ones. I don't write books for revenge. I'm not interested in imagining what it must have been like to be my grandmother—but I know people who write books like that and they're fascinating, people who put themselves back in someone else's perspective and tell the story. So, it's a very personal question. The way I wrestled with it was specific to my priorities, which are to protect the privacy of my loved ones, and professionally, to tell a good story.

If I weren't in it to deliver a good story and a good feeling of human connection and to give people words for their emotions, I wouldn’t make it a book. I could just keep a really great journal and that would be awesome.

KARIN: I think this idea of giving people language for their human experience is so important.

MARY LAURA: Books have done that for me so many times. So, I wanted to do that in my own way.



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To learn more about Mary Laura Philpott visit her site.

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A Conversation with Erin Khar

You'll find some rock solid advice in my conversation with author Erin Khar, whose memoir Strung Out hit the shelves during the pandemic. Erin established herself as a writer through an advice column on topics related to addiction and recovery, and she's offering a ton of it here to those who are writing memoir. She shares the quickest way to create a platform, how memoirs are getting sold to the big publishing houses, and why she thinks anyone looking to publish a book should invest in a therapist!

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ERIN KHAR is the author of STRUNG OUT, a memoir about her 15-year battle with opiate addiction that explores the very nature of why people do drugs, casting light on the larger opiate crisis, written with the intention to de-stigmatize the topic of drug addiction.

Erin's work has appeared many places, including Marie Claire, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Salon, The Times of London Sunday Magazine, The Rumpus, HuffPost, and SELF. Her syndicated advice column, Ask Erin, can be read each week HERE.

She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

KARIN GUTMAN: When did you know you had a book in you?

ERIN KHAR: I thought I might be headed towards a memoir, because I was back in school. I was a year shy of finishing my degree. So, I went back to school with a focus on writing, and the first class that I took was a personal essay class. My professor said, “I think you have a memoir in you,” and that put the first seed in my head. At that point, I'd had a few pieces published, but not a whole lot.

KARIN: What had you published? Things related to the memoir?

ERIN: Yeah, I think mostly everything I'd published at that point was related to addiction and recovery.

KARIN: So, was writing something you were pursuing head on?

ERIN: I was pursuing it pretty head on. My goal was to finish school and then to start working as a freelance writer. I had an advice column that I had started on my blog, that moved to a feminist website called Ravishly, maybe a year later. I ended up becoming an editor there and then the managing editor of that website.

KARIN: Where did the idea for the advice column come from?

ERIN: It was completely organic. I started the blog in the end of 2009 on Blogspot, as a way to get into a daily writing practice. My blog was called “Rarely wrong, Erin.” And the tagline was: “Rarely wrong, seldom right.” My friends always came to me for advice, even when I wasn't in the greatest shape, even in the height of drug addiction. So, it just seemed like a natural thing. It grew really organically to the point that I had a good audience. At the height of popularity on Ravishly it had a half million readers, which was insane. Now it's on my own website and I still have about 100,000 readers a month, which is pretty cool. I'm not getting paid to do it anymore, but I'm still doing it.

KARIN: Did writing the advice column feed your memoir?

ERIN: It certainly gave me a platform that helps sell the book, because I had an engaged audience that was interested in what I had to say. The voice of my advice column was very much the voice of the book.

KARIN: So, how did it evolve into a book?

ERIN So, as I said, I started writing personal essays and articles. I had a couple of articles that went a little bit viral, one of them was for Marie Claire.

KARIN: What was it about?

ERIN: I think they have a salacious title for it like, “My Secret Drug Addiction At Age 13,” and I realized the response to these very personal essays was quite large. I knew that I had to get the story out before I moved on to anything else. It served two purposes: the purpose of following this passion that I had for writing, but also, I felt like it might help people.

In the meantime, my agents read a piece of short fiction that I wrote on Cosmonauts Avenue, a small literary site. They contacted me to see what I was working on. I said, I'm working on this proposal for a memoir. They wanted to know what it was about. I told them and they said, Great, circle back to us when you're done with the proposal.

I sent them sample pages of my prologue and the first chapter, and they said, Come in and meet with us since you're in New York. They sold me on their agency, and it was a good agency, and I signed with them. We worked on the proposal for about eight months, and then it went out on submission. Two weeks later, it went to auction and I ended up at the house that I wanted to be at, so I was very happy about that. I feel really fortunate. It was fairly easy. I didn't query agents. That doesn't mean that any of it was easy in terms of the work.

KARIN: TNormalhat's the dream, you put your work out there and someone notices it. Did they know about your advice column and following?

ERIN: I suspect that it was definitely part of the reason they wanted to sign me, because it can be challenging with memoir. I have a lot of friends who are amazing writers and they'll hear things like, Well, you don't have enough of a platform. Platform really isn't about your social media followers. It can be a number of things, like consistently writing on the subject for top tier publications or being an expert speaker on the subject. It could also be because you have a large social media following. It's unfortunately an essential part of the package. It's not impossible to get an agent and a book deal without it, but you're helping yourself so much if you establish a platform for yourself. I don't have a huge social media following. I have less than 5,000 followers on each platform. But I had an engaged audience, and I had written a lot on the subject for decent publications.

If it's any consolation, my book came out 10 days before we went into lockdown for COVID. So that part of it was not ideal.

KARIN: Did you have a whole tour prepared?

Erin: I was on tour and came home early. I did my first four appearances and then the next 19 got cancelled.

KARIN: That’s really unfortunate.

ERIN: One thing I would advise, for anyone who's looking to publish a book, is to have a support system set up in advance. For me, I take psychiatric medication, so I have a psychiatrist who manages my medication. I have a therapist whom I see weekly. I had those things in place beforehand, because I knew that no matter what happened with the book I would need that kind of support.

My psychiatrist said that the book is only one part of your life, no matter what happens with it, and I tried to remember that, both when really big, good things happened and when COVID happened. I had to really remind myself on a regular basis that it was one part of who I was, not the whole picture, right? Because when you're leading up to publication, especially in my case, I had a lot of support from my publisher. I was a lead title. I went to media training. I had a lot of press. All of that was great. But I was so focused on the book for the year leading up to publication, like you've been running, running, running, and then suddenly everyone stops, and that was a jarring feeling. I think having that reminder for myself helped.

KARIN: Maybe we should all have a therapist on point.

ERIN: I think so. Especially when you're writing about personal things, because invariably no matter what you're writing about, there are going to be people who read the book and just don't like you—as the Narrator, as the main character in the book. And that is going to make them not like the book. Whereas when you're writing fiction, if they're saying they don't like the character, it's a character. With memoir, it's so personal.

I recently had somebody compile my worst reviews and put them in an email to me. It was an anonymous person through my contact form.

KARIN: That's just pure evil.

ERIN: It’s a lot easier for people to be mean from behind the computer. When I had the Marie Claire article come out, there were people in the comment section that said things like, Oh, the world would be better off if you had died, or that they feel sorry for my children. You know, why didn't I have an abortion? I don’t even take offense to that because it’s so ridiculous.

KARIN: It’s easy to be cruel, especially when it's anonymous.

Can you talk more about the book proposal?

ERIN: My agents do not sell any memoir on full manuscript. My agent only sells memoir on proposal. I think every single person I know in the last 5-6 years who sold a memoir, sold it on proposal. They did not submit a finished manuscript. That said, I know there are people who've gotten book deals by submitting their full memoir, but I think it's less common than it used to be. I was told by my agents that editors may have a certain idea of how they see the book being shaped. They may not be able to see their vision for the book if you're handing the completed manuscript, because memoir is so much about marketing it to the right audience.

KARIN: That’s interesting to hear.

ERIN: I'm talking about the big five publishing houses, or now it's the big three because they've all combined. I have a friend whose book didn't sell when her agent had it on submission. And then she took it back and finished the manuscript. She ended up publishing it through the Santa Fe Writers’ Project, which is both the contest and they are a really good independent publisher. So, a lot of the smaller independent publishers do want completed manuscripts. It's just from what I have seen with the top houses, they're only looking at proposals for memoir.

For example, I don't know if you read Stephanie Land’s book Maid? We have the same agent. Her book is huge. They just made it into a Netflix series. Hers was a proposal like Lauren Hough’s books were sold on proposal.

My proposal was an 80-page document. I had 35-40 pages of the marketing, chapter summaries, comps, platform, all of that, and then another 40 pages of sample chapters.

You're going to see all different sorts of examples if you look at book proposals, but the way that my agents do it is that they want the chapter summaries to read like a mini version of the book, so that when an editor reads through the chapter summaries they really get your voice. It took a long time to do this. I think the proposal is harder to write than the book. 100%. It took me eight months to do the proposal. And then when I got my book deal, I handed in my manuscript in three months. I do tend to write fast, but the proposal was much harder for me.

KARIN: The way you’re describing it, I’m imagining that the proposal lays out the logic of the narrative and how it builds.

ERIN: When I've helped people with proposals, there's your larger narrative arc, and then each chapter has its own narrative arc that could stand alone. But you're seeing the action propel forward. It really gives you an architecture for the book. I wouldn't have written the book that I wrote if I hadn't done the proposal first. For me personally, I wouldn't write a nonfiction book without a proposal. Fiction I work very differently, but for nonfiction I need that architecture.

KARIN: What kind of notes did you get from the editor?

ERIN: There wasn't anything major. There were certain places where she wanted me to go a little deeper, into more detail. My contract was for 65,000 to 80,000 words. But my editor and I both agreed to go longer. The book begins with the present day and then flashes back to age 13 in the first chapter, and then moves forward in time. So, you've got a good 30 years.

KARIN: Your voice is so accessible. You write great dialogue.

ERIN: I have been really fortunate that I've kept journals my entire life, from the time I was eight years old. When I went to write the memoir, not only did I have all of those journals, but there were several years where I had been writing letters back and forth with my best friend. We would write a letter over the course of a few days. I'd be like, Well then he said… and then I said, and write actual dialogue. We also made audio tapes for each other, where it's just me talking. So, I was able to listen back to myself telling a story about what happened, which was very helpful. There are pieces of dialogue in the book that are completely transcribed from my journals and letters. That said, they're never going to be 100% accurate because it’s still going to be my interpretation or memory of what happened, so I think that's why memoir isn't journalism, right? It's one person's viewpoint of these events and how they changed them and others.

I'm very visual. I think about books as if they were movies. I play out scenes in my head and if I'm going to write a scene, I try and latch on to one sense memory, whether it's the smell, or the temperature, or a sound, or how my body physically felt something. That's where I'll start. If I don't have the actual dialogue written down, then I will take the time to remember what was said, and of course, I can't say that it's 100% accurate, but the gist of it is very true.

I like dialogue because it makes a memoir a read like a novel to me. As much as I can easily keep somebody inside my head for the whole story, that can feel claustrophobic for a reader. They need to be outside of your head, too. I think dialogue achieves that and it keeps things moving and keeps you as the narrator in an active role. So yeah, dialogue is definitely something that I lean into. It's one of my strengths, I think.

Obviously, every memoirist is going to have a different strength—yours might not be dialogue, yours may be setting a sense of place. I think it's okay to lean into those things.

KARIN: How did you think about the arc, especially given that it spans so much time?

ERIN: What helped me with the arc is that I bookended the narrative with this conversation with my son. So, the book opens with my son asking me, “Mom, did you ever do drugs?” which is something that really happened. The whole book is me trying to answer that question. When I looked at it that way, a natural arc fell into place.

There are plenty of things that didn't make it in. There's an element of sexual abuse in my story, and there are people that wish I had spent more time on that or answered more questions about it, but it really wasn't a book about sexual abuse. With a lot of memoir, so many of us are writing about trauma. And trauma doesn't record in our brains the same way like an everyday memory would, so I may not have answers for some of these questions. And I think that that's okay. I don't think you have to tell the reader everything.

I think that it's important to be transparent. I knew going in that I had to be willing to be unlikable. Otherwise, I wasn't going to be able to write an honest story.

There's so much that comes up about, Whose story is it to tell? Obviously, when you're writing memoir, you're going to be writing about other people. But I really made a conscious effort and checked myself consistently that as I was telling the story, that it was my story to tell. So, there are details about my parents’ marriage that are not in the book, because it wasn't necessary, and it wasn't my story to tell. I was very conscious and conscientious about that, intentionally.

KARIN: This brings up the ethics of memoir…

ERIN: I changed all names. I changed every name except for my son and my husband, because I had already written about them in other publications and use their real names. A lot of publications including the New York Times will not let you use pseudonyms. But they also came after all the drugs, so they weren't implicated.

KARIN: Do you share the same last name as your husband?

No, I don't share the same last name as anyone in my family, including my parents, because my last name is an abbreviation of my maiden name, which I started using when I was a teenager as an actress. I just kept it and I'm so glad that I did. At a certain point, I was going to go back to my original maiden name and then I thought, No, because now everybody's protected. Right?

I pay for a service called Delete Me, so if people Google my name and try and find out what my father's name is, or my mother's name, or my husband's name, they cannot find it the way that you normally can. You can ask for your information to be manually removed from all of those sites. You can't find my addresses. You can't find people whom I've been associated with name-wise. It's just constantly scraping your information off the internet.

KARIN: That is smart!

Can you tell us more about how the structure fell into place?

ERIN: Sure. Originally, I wanted something that was not as linear, that started at a midpoint and then went forward and back. But ultimately, I wanted to write a book that a larger number of people would find accessible to read. So, I didn't want to write something that people would be put off by because it was more experimental or too lyrical. Although I love lyrical language, and I have moments of it in the book, I wanted to make sure that the voice was clear and accessible and relatable, because I wanted people to understand addiction in ways that they hadn't before. It wasn't just about me, it was also about the mechanics of addiction and how this is a subject that people are afraid to talk about even though everybody knows somebody who's dealt with it. There's still so much stigma around it, and I want people to have a better understanding that we're more similar than dissimilar. So many people said they couldn't believe how much they related to what I was going through internally, even though they had never experienced addiction.

KARIN: Was it cathartic to write your story?

ERIN: For me, the catharsis needed to occur before I wrote the book, because I needed to have that distance. I wrote about my worst years of addiction, but now I'm in recovery for 18 and a half years, so I have perspective that I wouldn't have if these things had happened a year ago. There's this mythology around memoir that it's just like writing a diary and that it must have been so easy to write. No, because as you know from studying this stuff, it's really about taking a personal story and crafting it into a narrative. And in memoir, I believe you're representing multiple characters in the book. There's you as the narrator, you as the person you were at different points within the memoir who doesn't have the perspective that the narrator does, and then you as the writer who is in conversation with the reader. So that's something that I was aware of as I was writing it, and that made it a lot easier to shift between the voice of Erin at 13 and the Narrator, who has the perspective to bring the reader in with me.

For me, the creation of art is to connect with people. I believe that what moves us when we hear a poem or read a book or watch a movie or listen to a piece of music or see an abstract painting, is because there's something in that work that reflects the experience of being human. I think that's true whether it's memoir or speculative fiction or a completely abstract painting. That is what we respond to. There's a frequency that reflects what it means to be human. I think that what we're responding to isn't just pure esthetics. It's that connection with other people and how we see ourselves reflected in the artwork.

I think that's why memoir is so powerful.

KARIN: It sounds like you became aware of your audience through writing the advice column, like a training ground.

ERIN: Yeah. Also, I thought about who was reading the book. I thought about young people who might be struggling the way that I did and how they would be reading the book, and I thought about the parents who've lost children to addiction and how they might be reading the book, and how people like my parents who had a really hard time talking about addiction, how they would read the book.

Here's a really good example: When I went to rehab the first time, I was 23 years old and my dad, CEO of a big fortune 500 company, was very shut down emotionally. He was horrified that I was not only in rehab but for shooting heroin, right? This is the worst thing he can imagine. He's like, I understand addiction and alcoholism, but why do you put a needle in your arm? And then you cut to the beginning of 2020. Both my parents read the book before it came out. They did not read it while I was in the process of writing it. When the book came out, anytime someone came over for dinner, he'd be like, “You should order the book right now.” This is a guy who couldn't talk about it before.

My book was not an easy read for my parents. But they know me so much better now that they've read it. Like I said, I was very careful not to throw anyone under the bus in it. I don't blame anyone for what happened in my childhood or the things that got me from here to there because here I am, and I'm okay with who I am now.

I cast the harshest light on myself. There's nowhere in the book that I was blaming people or not taking ownership of things, even in abusive situations. Not excusing, but I'm not telling the reader how they should look at them.

KARIN: Can you give an example of what you mean?

ERIN: Like with my older son's father. We had a tumultuous relationship. He was really emotionally abusive, but I was very careful. I wanted the dynamics in our relationship to come through without going into too much detail. I have a couple of specific incidents that happened, but I didn't want to have to spell out this person as an emotional abuser because that's my kid's dad, and it's not my job to spell it out for anyone. I think you can tell a truthful story without indicting anyone. I think you can just present what happened and how you experienced it.

There's a scene where I find out that my ex-husband was still cheating on me. We have this big confrontation. I asked him if he even loved me and he said, “How could I love you, you’re a broken dog.” It's one of those moments, I'll never forget what he said. That dialogue is in the book, and I told him it was going to be in the book. I don't have to then go on to explain how fucked up I think that was. The reader can draw their own conclusions. I also show the parts of him that were good because nobody is all one thing, right? I wanted to portray anyone who was in the book for a substantial length of time in the way that you experience people—they can be a horrible jerk and also have made you feel really loved at one time.

It's funny when I had my book signing in LA, all of my friends wore name tags that said ‘Hello, my name is’ with the name of their character in the book.

KARIN: How fun!

Let’s talk about building a platform.

ERIN: The fastest way to getting a platform is to write something provocative—and I don't mean provocative in a negative way—but something that grabs people's attention, that hits a nerve resonates with people on a widely read site.

Sue Shapiro wrote a book called the Byline Bible, for building your platform. I used to do pitching workshops with her. She breaks down how to e-mail an editor, what to say, all of that kind of stuff. I think it's a numbers game, too. You're more likely to get something published if you keep sending it out and having a formula for how you pitch something. That includes understanding the publication that you're pitching to and who their audience is.

I think another big part of platform is being a good literary citizen. A lot of it is showing up in social media, engaging with other people in a meaningful way, promoting other writers’ work. I do a thing every Monday, which is like my Monday reading thread, where I share articles and essays and things that I've read through the week. I do a Twitter thread promoting everybody's work. I have really good relationships with a lot of editors. Even if I'm not actively publishing with their publication, they've been super supportive of my work, because I've really been supportive of their publication. It's like that.

Having a literary community supporting you is part of marketing and part of your platform because you have a network of people. For example, I had a whole spreadsheet of editors and writers who I knew I could contact when the book was coming out. I posted something in my writing groups on Facebook and on Twitter that ARC's (advanced reader copies) were coming out if anyone wanted to do a review. I had a huge response from that. My NPR review was from somebody who said, Yeah, I'd love to have a copy. So, I think that's how you build community and platform.

Supporting other writers brings back a lot to you as well. There are some writers that you're going to support constantly and they'll never throw you a bone. It doesn't matter. I don't even pay attention. I just like doing it because I love writers. I want to support them. I want our words to be seen.



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