Author Interview: Laura Zigman

Yesterday, I posted a review of a very humorous book, Piece of Work, by Laura Zigman. Despite the hectic holidays, Ms. Zigman was kind enough to answer some interview question for us, and I will be posted them here for you today. You might want to grab a cup of coffee for a relatable heart to heart conversion with this one time publicist turned author.

As I mentioned in my review, your characters are so authentic, it was like reading about my own life. What is your technique for creating believable characters?

I’m embarrassed to admit that my “technique” is drawing from my own experiences or those of close friends. In the case of dealing with a spouse who’d lost his job, I had several friends who’d gone through this – husbands who had lost their jobs which required a whole change in the division of family labor – so I felt like I had some idea of what that would be like. Since I’ve been lucky enough to work at home since my son was born, the feelings I ascribed to Julia about going back to work and having to leave her son behind were my own: I would have been very sad to have had to do that. As for Mary Ford, the beast of a has-been – well, she was real, too. Based on a mixture of celebrity authors I traveled with when I was a publicist for Random House 15 years ago.

In Piece of Work, Julia Einstein really has her hands full with a difficult client. As a publishing industry insider, I’m sure you’ve seen your share of difficult personalities. What are some of the most outrageous demands you’ve heard writer’s make? What’s your best advice for writers who want to develop positive relationships with their agents, editors and book publicists?

You know, the worst demands were made by Hollywood celebrities who occasionally crossed over into book publishing: those celebrities who had written (or who had paid someone to write) their memoirs. Hollywood demands make publishing demands look ridiculously small, since the scope of everything in the movie business – money, fame, power – dwarfs everything else. Most of the time those celebrity memoirs were written by has-beens – people whose careers had waned slightly or significantly – and because of the ebb in their fame they come into the publication of their book already insecure and feeling entitled. They want to be pampered, catered to, treated like a star, and their demands are ridiculous. Everyone has a right to have preferences – certain pens, certain food and drink – but the level of accommodation becomes insane when you are forced to drive around Cincinnati for two hours looking for a particular brand of water. Even non-Hollywood authors made outrageous demands – everyone wants their 15 minutes. And when you’re the publicist that 15 minutes can seem like a lifetime.

 The best advice for any author is to treat everyone they come in contact with politely. This probably seems ridiculous to actually articulate – it’s common sense, right? – but you’d be surprised how many authors are rude and petulant and extremely unpleasant to deal with. If you want your publicist or your agent or your publisher to listen to you and do as much to promote you and your book as they possibly can, you have to be nice. That means saying please and thank you. A lot. Which really isn’t that hard.

In previous interviews you explained that your first book (Animal Husbandry) took five years to write do to the demands of a full-time job, while you wrote your second book (Dating Big Bird) over the course of three months in a rented beach house. What is writing like now that you’re a mom?

It’s funny. When I was writing Animal Husbandry – single, living in New York, completely convinced that I would never finish my book and that even if I did it would suck and never get published – writing was much more difficult than it is now. Back then, I would have to be in the mood to write, which, quite frankly, happened maybe once or twice a year. That meant all the rest of the time I’d have to get myself in the mood – I’d have to have cigarettes. I’d have to be sitting in a certain position. The planets would have to be aligned in a certain way. Needless to say, I didn’t write very much (but luckily when I did, I would write a lot and for long stretches of time).

 Now things are very different. I’m the breadwinner of the family and so writing has become what I do for a living, which makes doing it easier in certain fundamental aspects. It takes away all the emotional parts of writing that often get in the way – there is no room for being in the mood, or not feeling like it, or feeling like a giant loser or a shitty writer. I have to do it. So when I’m working on something – like a book, or an article – the minute my son goes to school and I come home, I’m working. And I work until he comes home. It’s that simple.

 Of course, there are plenty of times I’m not working – when I’m in between projects, or “thinking,” or busy with housework or bill-paying or dishwasher unloading or sock-drawer organizing – and on those days I don’t write at all. When you “work at home” that kind of includes all kinds of work. And some days the work doesn’t include writing.

Your third book (Her) was published in 2002, while your latest novel Piece of Work was first release in 2006. In what ways did you four-year hiatus mirror Julia’s?

You know, one of the things I learned during that time was that success isn’t permanent. I’d been very lucky with my first few books – generous advances had allowed me to take my time between books. But after HER was published I seemed to hit a rough patch. HER didn’t sell as well as we’d all hoped it would. I wrote a mystery that my publisher (and about 10 other publishers) didn’t want. I had to “break-up” with my long-term agent who had become a very close friend. Movie options were dropped and with them potential income was lost. Basically, I had to deal with a whole host of career dominos that could have fallen one way but ended up falling another. Lots of things went wrong and I found myself up to my eyeballs in failure – or, more correctly, in my sense of failure. Failure is relative, and so is success, and how we feel about where we are has almost everything to do with how we define each of those points. For me, I was less concerned with the narcissistic elements of my alleged failures and much more concerned with their tangible ramifications: as the breadwinner I become completely terrified that I was not going to be able to continue pulling off the magic hat trick of paying the mortgage while remaining a stay-at-home mother. When I started writing Piece of Work I was truly feeling like a has-been and so that idea really infused the book: Julia feels like a has-been who has to make a comeback as a publicist; Mary Ford is has-been desperate for a comeback to reclaim her fame; Peter, Julia’s husband, feels like a has been because he’s lost his job and can’t find another one. It sounds like such a cliché but life is full of ups and downs and we’re constantly in flux between the two states of being.

On your website you describe your novels as thinly disguised autobiographies? How does your family feel about the characters in your novels? Do they ever recognize themselves or do they argue that you’ve grossly misrepresented them? Or have you ever created a fictional character that someone misconstrued as themselves?

That’s a great question – my parents were actually disappointed to find out that they weren’t in Animal Husbandry. They’d spent all those years while I was writing it wondering how they would be portrayed – pretending to be nervous and scared at what I would say about them – and so I got the last laugh! They actually love being in the books – I described they’re ridiculous way it takes them 3 weeks to pack for a one week trip in Dating Big Bird, and then in Piece of Work I show them being themselves – Costco chickens and impromptu games of Jewish Geography and all. I also talk about Julia’s parents having lost a child and how that has affected their family and that is based on my family too: my parents lost their first child and its something cast a long shadow on their lives, and mine.

 As for my husband – he’s a very very good sport. I based Donald from HER on him in certain ways – he’s hilarious in a kind of out-there way – and I had a lot of fun with that character. Luckily, he saw the humor in it too.

In Piece of Work, you draw some parallels between managing a domestic environment and managing a business environment. What is the significance of this parallel for you?

No matter how difficult it is to manage a home situation – and I don’t even have it that bad since we have only one child as compared to other people with two or three or four – nothing compares to the stress of an office job for me. Maybe it was the job itself – I was a book publicist for 10 years at Random House in New York – that made me so crazy but to me that’s the worst possible stress situation. Give me 20 snacks and 40 lunches to make and I’ll take that any day over getting prepared for a marketing meeting. The only exception to this is playdates: having playdates at my house completely unhinge me.

On your blog you link to the website Work it, Mom! where co-founder Nataly Kogan posted a rant about the term “mompreneur”. She noted how no one calls male entrepreneurs “dadpreneurs.” I think Julia Einstein beautifully illustrates the conflicted feelings that many women are trying to resolve through new business models. Do you think there is a tendency for men to compartmentalize their roles while women long to integrate them? Why do think women feel so compelled to be all things at once? Do you think we can do it successfully?

I love that piece Nataly wrote because it’s so true – not just in the business world where she’s absolutely right that no one calls men in business who are dads “dadpreneurs” – but also in writing. No matter what I write now – if there’s a woman in it it gets slapped as either “chick lit” or “mommy lit.” Period. I’m not sure why this is and I feel like I’ve been a really good sport about the Chick Lit thing – people have a lot worse problems, I’ve always believed, then not loving the fact that their novels are categorized in a pejorative way – but now it’s getting a little annoying. I’d like to write a memoir about having moved home to where I grew up and what it’s like being at this point in life – 45, married, with a young child – but I just know with any kind of framing like that it will be thrown into the Mommy Lit pile and labeled accordingly. Women do, as you say, live their lives in a more integrated way – they multi-task without thinking while men do not. I think the only thing that gets us into trouble is thinking that we can do it all at the same time. We can’t. We can do a lot of things just not necessary all at once. So we should forgive ourselves for “failing.”

In your Washington Post article on The Writing Life: How to summon forth the Secret Author Person within you, you talk about repressing the desire to write in order to fit in with social expectations (i.e. a respectable career). Is that why you took the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course—to find a respectable job within the publishing industry? As a former insider, what can you tell us about industries perspective on “chic lit/mom lit”? What should women writing within this genre know?

I took the Radcliffe Publishing Course mainly because I truly didn’t know what I was going to do for work when I grew up. I knew I couldn’t work at IHOP for the rest of my life. But I couldn’t do math and sucked at standardized tests which meant that there was no way I could go to law school, much less make it through the LSAT. My parents, while supportive of my writing in general, were very discouraging about the idea that I would be able to earn a living doing it. They’d grown up in the Depression and to them the only acceptable way to approach life was with a job with benefits in hand. So I grew up believing that, too. I was not one of those brave people who started out taking a different route. I took the safest route I could – which meant trying to find a job in an industry that was interesting. And book publishing was perfect.

 As for the genre of “chick lit” or “mom lit” – all I can say is that instead of trying to write into a certain genre, you should write about what you feel passionately about. When I was writing Animal Husbandry, chick lit didn’t exist. It happened afterwards, when my book and a bunch of other books proved that a collective consciousness exists and at the time that collective consciousness was focused on single women who were trying to figure out their lives. “Mommy Lit’ is sort of an extension of this: the same single women who are now married with children are still trying to figure out their lives. The only thing to remember when writing is that you have to – have to – be passionately engaged in the world you’re writing about because writing a book takes a long time.

Have you started a new project? What is the initial writing phase like for you?

Speaking of failure: I wrote about 100 pages of a non-fiction book on failure – all the different ways we “fail” which actually lead to success – but, well, it failed to sell to a publisher. Which means I officially failed at failure. Luckily, I’m collaborating on a book with Patti Novak, star of the A&E reality show “Confessions of a Matchmaker” and real-life hilarious matchmaker from Buffalo, New York, and I’m really excited about it. There’s a big relief writing about someone else – telling someone else’s story — instead of my own. And now I have a partner instead of having to do it all by myself.