Episode 64: Hester Kaplan

A conversation with the author of Twice Born: Finding My Father In The Margins Of Biography.We discuss:-The circular nature of writing a book-Deciding which details and anecdotes are relevant to the bigger story-How to write about our parents-What to do with memories that keep surfacing-The inclusion of fiction in memoir-Differences between memoir and biography-Thoughts on publishing-Books that inspired her in the writing of Twice Born

A conversation with the author of Such A Pretty Picture:Andrea Leeb was told by multiple agents that her book needed more reflection, more self-examination, because, they all explained, that’s what memoir is. “I was really torn because I was just like, this is not what I want to write,” Andrea said of her book, Such A Pretty Picture. “...I took out—even up to the last minute—whole chunks because I had started getting influenced by that.”Andrea was 4-years-old the first time her father sexually abused her. It went on for years. In the following passage she’s at home one night and tiptoes down the stairs to overhear a conversation between her parents. "Mrs. Powers told me that Andrea cries every day," my mother said. She must have assumed Sarai and I were both sound asleep, because she didn't even bother whispering. I heard every word."Andrea's hypersensitive," my father said."Why would you say that?""Andrea has problems," he said. "We give her everything, but she's never happy." A beat later. "Marlene, could you make me another drink?""You've had two already." But my mother must have gotten up to make him one, because a minute or so later I heard the sound of the refrigerator door open and the clink of ice cubes against glass."Look, I know this is upsetting," my father said, "but we may have to face it. Andrea might be emotionally disturbed.""Do you think we should get her help?" my mother asked. "Send her to a child psychiatrist?""No," my father said loudly. "I mean, not yet.""Why would we wait?""Right now, she's a crazy little girl. Hysterical. If we make too big a deal, you never know what she'll say to get attention." My father paused. "Besides, kids usually outgrow these things." This is the style of memoir I’m drawn to. One that is cinematic without reflection from the writer, because it’s these scenes that evoke a visceral reaction from the reader. Andrea worked with a writing teacher, Pam Houston, who told her, “Your readers are smart. You don’t have to explain everything to them. [They] aren’t going to need a play-by-play of what you should be feeling and you also don’t want to—and this really stayed with me as I revised—you don’t want to tell them what they should be feeling. They should get to feel what they want from your book.” It’s not easy to read a book about child sexual abuse, but every night I was eager to read another chapter. It was riveting, suspenseful, and reminded me of the way I felt reading The Glass Castle. “I take so much joy out of when people tell me the writing is good because that was so important to me, because I am a reader, and I love, love, love good writing,” Andrea said. “I love that moment where you read a book and you can’t put it down and you’re so happy. And then you’re kind of sad, even if the book was sad, that you don’t get to be in that book anymore.”Recommended reading from Andrea:Wild Game by Adrienne BroderReading Like a Writer by Francine ProseBastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy AllisonThe Glass Castle by Jeannette WallsEducated by Tara Westover

A conversation with the author of Dispatches From The Couch: A Neuroscientist and her Therapist Conspire to Reboot Her Brain.When including flashbacks to childhood sexual abuse, Stacey included questions she had at the time. These questions perfectly captured the confusion of the experiences, while at the same time showed just how young she was. Was I wearing my hair in pigtails? Or did he brush the shimmery strands aside. Was this after my Dorothy Hamill haircut? There’s a fair amount of self-loathing for her childhood self. Rather than tell the reader this, Stacey lets us into her mind to see the self-loathing for ourselves:Why can't there be a surgical option to cut any remnants of that chubby little misfit out of my adult self?Within the walls of our house, the overarching sense that we were a healthy, stable family dissolved overnight when fifth grade Stacey opened her goddamned mouth.If I could go back in time, I would let him do even worse things if I could tell myself to keep my fucking mouth shut.So much healing came after the book was published. Stacey’s older sister, at first, said she had no plans to read it because “she already lived it.” Once the book was published, though, she did read it, and the two spoke openly in a way that Stacey said it was the start of a completely new relationship with her sister. Stacey was most nervous to share the book with her mother. In one scene towards the end, she writes about the time she was in kindergarten and had been recently, repeatedly, sexually abused by her perpetrator, a dean at their church and family friend. The abuse had been going on for some time. On this particular day, Stacey seemed fine in the morning but once she got to school she felt sick, and her mom had to come pick her up. In the scene, Stacey’s mom is livid with her. She keeps up appearances with the teacher but once their in the car she unleashes on Stacey: "Why do you keep doing this? Who are you lying to, her or me? What kind of mother sends her daughter to school only to have her say she is sick this many days in a row? If you are sick, you need to stay home in the first place. Why ride all the way on the bus if you are going to tell her your stomach hurts as soon as you get here?! Now Mrs. Conway thinks I am a bad mother!!"I found Stacey’s mom in this particular moment to be completely relatable. Only Stacey and the reader knew about the abuse. I felt myself in her mom’s shoes, expecting to go about my day as planned and then getting a phone call from the school, and then losing my patience with a kid who claimed to be sick but just seemed fine when she was at home. I think, in memoir, you have to go all in on sharing the ugly or unlikeable parts of another character. When you try to protect them by skirting around the truth or caveating with explanations and excuses—or worse, skipping parts altogether—it makes those characters less relatable. This one scene and this one paragraph made my heart break for little kindergarten Stacey, yes, and it made my heart break for a mother who did not yet know what was going on, and did not parent perfectly on that day, just like I don’t on so many days. This scene made her mother human. Books that inspired the writing in Stacey's memoir: Body Work by Melissa FebosWhip Smart by Melissa FebosWintering by Katherine MayDispatches from the Couch is now available as an audiobook from Barnes & Noble and will soon be available on all major platforms.

A conversation with the author of The Maps They Gave Us.Wayne Scott refers to himself in the third person when discussing his memoir. I asked if that was a tool. “Absolutely,” Wayne said. “Some of my most miserable experiences in writers’ critique groups have been when people were writing memoir, and as you’re having the conversation in the group they’re saying, ‘I did this, I did that.’ They’re talking about the story and continuing it in the first-person narrative, and then it really just becomes group therapy because people want to rush and comfort the ‘I’ that’s sitting in front of them.”Wayne and I also discussed when to take creative liberties and change inconsequential details, how to build suspense in scenes, how writing in first-person present tense kept him more vulnerable because it created guard rails around the narrative and did not allow him the foresight or knowledge of the writer at the desk, and how he thinks about writing memoir and its impact on our kids.I asked his advice on how to move through the publishing process for my own book.“Write an honest book that’s beautiful,” he said. “And don’t think about the market. Then see where you can make it go.”References:Wayne’s Modern Love essayHuffington Post essays about his son:Why We Let Our Teenage Son Treat His Mental Health Issues With MarijuanaMy Son Is Skipping Thanksgiving This Year, But Not For The Reasons You Might Expect

A conversation with my editor, Michael Dean. Our biggest tension, in the eighteen months we’ve worked together on my book, is Show vs. Tell. I want to show all the time with action, dialogue, examples, and stories but Michael says you can’t only show. You have to tell sometimes so the reader can make sense of what you’ve shown them. We discussed multiple examples of showing and telling, and what makes a good tell vs. a bad tell. We also worked towards a new principle. There are two yous in the book—the you in the story and the writer at the desk. The new principle is this: the writer at the desk should be curious. The writer at the desk can wonder and think and have tangential thoughts, but she cannot show emotion or pass judgment. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing about a story that happened twenty years ago or one that happened yesterday. There has to be some detachment from the writer-you and the person-in-the-story-you. So I can say a direct quote from the me in the story that was emotional: “Get out of the pool! You’re not listening!” but my commentary on that cannot pass judgment with something like, “I shouldn’t have said that,” or “They were stressing me out,” or “I wish I could just be more patient with my kids.” Michael, who has a knack for coming up with principles, added, “It's not that no present self is allowed, it's that the present self shouldn't do too much emotional manipulation. They can wonder, digress, show you things like a time traveler, but it's not their role to label or interpret.”This led to our thoughts on vulnerability and what it means to be vulnerable. I said vulnerability should feel scary when you hit publish, like jumping off the high dive. If you write something shameful or embarrassing like, “I yelled in my kid’s face,” you can’t then say some version of, “I know that was wrong, I know that was terrible, I know I’m the worst.” Michael added, “To be vulnerable means to surrender control of the narrative of yourself.”

A conversation with the author of My Salinger Year.How many characters do you really need? Make a list. Every character needs to be fully-fleshed, each with their own motivations. In order to make them real, you need to find them interesting, complicated. You need to be curious. Then, you need to write from a place of love and cold-bloodedness at the same time. “If you really want to write something great, if you’re really aiming at greatness, at things truly working, not at just like getting something out there, you have to be okay with letting some time pass. … You ultimately know what you want to do. You know what your book is, even if you don’t think you do, you do, and you just have to do be patient with yourself.”Book proposals are difficult to write (it took her two years to write her most recent book proposal). It’s not something to write on your own; it’s something you tackle with an agent. You should not consider hiring a publicist until you sell your book to a publisher. Favorite writing conferences:Bread Loaf Writers’ ConferenceSewaneeAWP ConferenceUnbound Festival Newburyport Literary Festival Nantucket Literary FestivalBook recommendations:Fairyland by Alysia AbbottPoser by Claire DedererWild by Cheryl StrayedWhen Skateboards Will Be Free by Saiid SayrafiezadehThe Mothercode by Ruthy AckermanPermission by Elissa AltmanAll You Can Ever Know by Nicole ChungAll of Donna Tartt’s novelsThe Girls from Corona del Mar by Rufi ThorpeFaith by Jennifer HaighWrite Through It by Kate McKean

A conversation with the author of If You Must Go, I Wish You Triplets:-When you include your thoughts that are unkind, immature, or that you’re embarrassed to admit, it’s funny and relatable. “In the bedroom, I grab two boxes and throw in Perry's shirts, belts, ties, underwear, shorts, and pants, and dump them in the garage. Hopefully, they'll mildew.”-Sometimes you need an outside perspective to title your book. You, as the writer, are too close to it. Fresh eyes on the manuscript could see something you don’t. Virginia used a company called Title Doctor.-When you’re writing a scene about your younger self, think of how that version of you is different from your current self. In Virginia’s case, she used to curse a lot and avoided direct confrontation with her mother, so in the scene, she cursed (only once; otherwise it would have been distracting), and when he mother asked her questions she responded in other ways: shrugging off the jacket she didn’t want, and cursing in her mind, wondering where her ride was. -Endings are hard! According to Virginia, “It’s hard to sign out.” She wrote an Epilogue five years later, and ended with dialogue—a conversation with her ex-husband. Originally, the exchange was supposed to be at the beginning of the book. Late in the writing process, she moved it to the end. -Virginia published her book through Apprentice House Press, the nation’s first and largest entirely student-managed book publisher. They don’t require an agent. University presses are a great way to publish your book if you don’t self-publish or go through a traditional publisher. -Write fan letters to your favorite writers! Virginia wrote a fan letter to Abigail Thomas. She wrote that it was her first fan letter, told her how much she loved her writing, and that she had had a small writing success. Abigail responded immediately and said no writing success is small, and asked Virginia to share the link for the article she had published. Later, Virginia asked her to write a blurb. Abigail read her manuscript and wrote a blurb that said, “I’ve never quite felt this way before with any other book.” -Virginia’s advice, when I asked about publishing my first book, was to get into a writers group. You need a few people to read your writing and see how everything is landing.

A conversation with the author of It Must Be Beautiful To Be Finished.-The key to writing about someone you love who you’ve also been hurt by, is to write with empathy. Think about their perspective and their experience and be generous and loving when you do. -Be wary of the please-feel-bad-for-me voice-Analogies should be both fresh and accurate-Metaphors written as standalone chapters, without any reference to how they relate to your story, are a powerful way to trust the reader and not hit them over the head with they're meaning. -The most important person in getting her book published was her agent.-Three memoirs that have inspired her writing.

A conversation with the author of Happy To Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser.LINKSBooks:Happy To HelpWhen Did I Get Like This?Essay:Why I Didn't Want A Girl (originally titled: A Daughter At Last)Podcast:What Fresh Hell? References:Mom 2.0 ConferenceBooked Author seriesZibby Retreat (Santa Barbara)

Here’s what I learned from Happy To Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser by Amy Wilson:Include your fantasies. It’s especially funny if you can incorporate four levels in the build up to the punchline:First: set the scene—what’s about to happenSecond: set the stakes—why is this a big dealThird: fantasy/a positive hypothetical of what’s to comeFourth: Dialogue/action of what actually transpiredWrite a short and snappy analogy that has pronouns and alliteration: “It was like hiring Kidz Bop for a bachelor party.”Include proper nouns. Proper nouns that are personal to you make the writing more compelling, specific, and yes, even funny: “I used to make fun of my husband for letting his perception of a good night's sleep be ruined by what his Whoop told him.”