Episode 220 #ComedicMemoir with Kari Lizer

Kari Lizer is best known for her work in television, as writer and co-executive producer of Will & Grace and the creator of The New Adventures of Old Christine. When her essays about parenting took the shape of a book, she found that her real life provided more than enough material for a comedic memoir. Aren’t You Forgetting Someone? has it all - chickens, Kate Middleton’s bangs, psychics, and the promise of happy endings.

#AmReading

Jess: Beach Read by Emily Henry

Sarina: The Worst Best Man by Mia Sosa

Kari: Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

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This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwriting for details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.

Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.

If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.

Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)

KJ Dell'Antonia 0:00

Writers it's KJ here. Before we get to the interview, which is Jess and Sarina talking to the very funny Kari Lizer I wanted to share a little about our new sponsor, Dabble. I wrote my last book in a mad combination of Word and Scrivener and it worked fine. But putting the whole thing together in the end was hard and I accidentally left out a chapter of a draft confusing everyone. With dabble, the whole book is always just sitting there already compiled and together as a unit and easy to navigate around in as chapters or scenes. It is magical and it can't wait to make full use of it this time around. Give it a spin at dabblewriter.com and let us know what you think. Is it recording?

Jess Lahey 0:43

Now it's recording.

KJ Dell'Antonia 0:45

This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone trying to remember what I'm supposed to be doing.

Jess Lahey 0:49

Alright, let's start over.

KJ Dell'Antonia 0:51

Awkward pause. I'm gonna rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three.

Jess Lahey 1:02

Hey, this is the #AmWriting podcast with Jess Lahey and Sarina Bowen, KJ is off this week. This is the podcast where we talk about all the things - all the writing things, the researching, the editing. I'm just about to start editing today, actually. So we'll probably slip in and mention of that - writing romance, writing fiction, writing nonfiction, writing all the things we love to talk about. And this is definitely the podcast though, first and foremost, about getting the writing done. I'm Jessica Lahey I'm the author of The Gift of Failure and the forthcoming The Addiction Inoculation that will be out next year, April 2021. And you can find my work at the Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other lovely places like Airmail recently, actually.

Sarina Bowen 1:47

And I'm Sarina Bowen I'm the author of 35 romance novels. My most recent USA Today bestseller is called Sure Shot and you can find more about me at sarinabowen.com.

Jess Lahey 1:59

So can I just say one thing? I was I was tooling around on Facebook looking for something and all of a sudden, I noticed that you dropped like an additional thing to Sure Shot. And I simply do not understand when you write all the things. I don't understand how you write all the things, you write everything and you write stuff that you don't even tell us about, and launch it out into the world and it makes my head spin.

Sarina Bowen 2:22

Well, thank you, I think. Yes, I did have a couple chapter prequel that I put into an anthology that someone was putting together and it really wasn't the world's greatest accomplishment there, Jess, but thanks anyway.

Jess Lahey 2:39

Alright, well, we have a guest this week, and I'm really, really excited about this guest because we have found out that number one, we have some things in common that we need to talk about, but also because this book almost made me late for this interview because I was having so much fun reading it, I couldn't put it down. It is so funny. Without further ado, I would like to introduce Kari Lizer. Her new book is called Aren't You Forgetting Someone?: Essays From My Midlife Revenge? And, okay, we've talked before about getting blurbs and this woman, this book, she's got some blurbs on this book. It's a very funny book. She is a former executive producer and writer for Will and Grace. And that's going to figure into a little tiny bit of the conversation today. But Kari, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Kari Lizer 3:35

Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Jess Lahey 3:37

Such a delightful book. And it's not just because a lot of the action happens in Vermont and Sarina has written an entire series that is a romance series based completely on a fictional small town in Vermont. There are chickens, there are lots of animals. And so we've got that angle going on, but we we also have the devotedly introverted sort of thing going on, obviously the writer thing going on as well. So we're just really excited to talk with you today.

Kari Lizer 4:17

It's nice to have that in common. It's a specific thing for sure. Vermont people are a certain kind of people, I know that.

Jess Lahey 4:27

We're reading this book at a really interesting time because most of the book is about just the thrill people get (people like us) tend to get when someone says something is canceled. And everything's canceled right now. So how are you doing? We're recording this at the beginning of June, on June 11. So we've all been on our own or at least in close proximity to very few other people. How are you doing?

Kari Lizer 5:00

Well, I spent the first few months of this lockdown shut-in period in Los Angeles, which was very different than it feels here in Vermont. It was stranger there for sure. I