Episode 221 #FeelingExposed in Memoir and Fiction

This week, Jess got a message from some family members who’d read the draft of her forthcoming book, The Addiction Innoculation. They had … thoughts.

Those thoughts turned out to be nothing drastic—but the emotional roller coaster Jess rode while waiting to hear more was a doozy, and got us all thinking about how much of ourselves is exposed when we write non-fiction with a memoir element, how real memoirists do it, and how often readers—especially those closest to you—read our fiction looking for hidden truths. It’s a fun conversation that also covers pool floats, parents, dream offices we probably wouldn’t use and more.

Links from the Podcast

Yard Pods

Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley

Mrs. Everything by Jen Weiner

KJ and Sarina’s Pool Floats

#AmReading

KJ: Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

Jess: Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford

Sarina: Don’t You Forget About Me by Mhairi McFarlane

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

KJ Dell'Antonia 0:00

Hey there. Before we embark on a new episode, I get to tell you 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 a chapter out of a draft, confusing everyone. With Dabble the whole book is always just sitting there, already compiled and together as a unit, but still easy to navigate around in using chapters or scenes. It's magical, and I 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 0:38

Now it's recording. Go ahead.

KJ Dell'Antonia 0:41

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

Jess Lahey 0:45

Alright, let's start over.

KJ Dell'Antonia 0:46

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

I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting, the podcast about writing all the things - fiction, nonfiction, memoir, essays, proposals, pitches. In short, as I say most nearly every week, this is the podcast about sitting down and getting your writing work done.

I'm Jess Lahey. I'm the author of The Gift of Failure and the forthcoming Addiction Inoculation that'll be out in April 2021. And currently writing some stuff for The Washington Post and Air Mail. And yeah, I guess that's about it.

Sarina Bowen 1:31

And I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of 35 romance novels. And I'm currently writing nothing and it is glorious.

KJ Dell'Antonia 1:41

I'm KJ Dell'Antonia. I'm the author of How To Be a Happier Parent and the novel The Chicken Sisters, which is coming out this December look for it in bookstores near you if you can be in them and goodness knows I hope you can, but I'm not holding my breath. I am the former editor of The Motherlode Blog at the New York Times where I sometimes still contribute. And I write things for other places. But I am primarily now focused on fiction, kind of, mostly, more about that in a minute maybe.

Jess Lahey 2:12

Speaking of being able to go into bookstores, I was able to go into one for the first time recently, they're limiting their customers. I went to the Phoenix Bookstore in Burlington, and I was able to browse and I had just forgotten how much I miss browsing and I found a couple of books and I was so excited to just sort of be able to look at the things and not online. It was very exciting.

KJ Dell'Antonia 2:37

I have been really aching to do that and haven't done it since March, but I have a couple of possible abilities to do that in my immediate future I hope.

Jess Lahey 2:50

I stayed in like the gardening section and the cooking section and just looked at all these books. I miss it. I miss it so much. Hold on, can we go back to what Sarina said about not working on anything right now like this is monumental because you're always working, Sarina, you're constantly working. Are you taking a break right now between projects?

Sarina Bowen 3:15

I am. And it's partly because I'm just burnt out and need a break. And partly because I have a lot of promo and organizational stuff that could really eat an entire month. And I'm ahead for the first time in many months - ahead of publication schedule.

KJ Dell'Antonia 3:34

Wow, that sounds glorious.

Jess Lahey 3:36

That's really amazing. KJ, what are you doing?

KJ Dell'Antonia 3:38

Well, my agent has just given me back some edits on what I hope will be my next novel. So I'm finishing those up and then we'll figure out where we are going from there. But I suspect that I will finish those edits up and then that will be sort of temporarily finished and then it is time to start something new. So I am wandering through the world thinking what's the next novel? Who's it about? And I'm spending a lot of time thinking things like well but wait the last two were about people and their mothers. I apparently can't stop with people and their mothers. And then I was like, Well, lots of authors can't stop with people and their mothers.

Sarina Bowen 4:26

Well, we all had one or we missed having one, so that's a big theme.

KJ Dell'Antonia 4:34

It is universal, but it's almost feels like it should be its own genre. And then I've been noodling a possible nonfiction thing. Just a little something about writing.

Jess Lahey 4:57

That's really exciting.

KJ Dell'Antonia 4:58

I've been having fun thinking about it.

Jess Lahey 5:00

Yeah, I didn't expect to have many deadlines right now. But then stuff came up and I was asked to write some things. I'm working on two book reviews that will be due in the next couple months, two books that I never would have picked up on my own. So I'm learning a lot from both books and I can't say what they are. And then Tim and I are writing a piece together for a big national publication about going back to school in the age of COVID. And the problem with that it's going to be in print and so the word count has to be pretty on target. And the problem is this is such a big topic that even our outline at one point was longer than our final word count. Well and I just texted you guys about this before we started, but working in the same house together, Tim and I write toget