Give
us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
This book is, at its heart, about
intimacy. With our work, with our most beloved friends, our families, our
chosen families, our doctors, our colleagues, ourselves. It is about how I was
loved so much that I was transformed from being a very lonely person into a
less lonely person.
What
boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of
courage come from?
I wasn’t aware of boundaries while I
was writing, though now that it’s coming out I wonder what kind of covenants of
secrecy I’ve broken with my family, my friends, etc. I did break one formal boundary,
which was about time and foreshadowing: I kept foreshadowing the character
Allison’s death, in increasingly present ways, which I did in order to mirror
my experiential sense of her dying - which is that I kept knowing that she was
going to die, and was still absolutely floored with grief when she did.
I love that your question indicates
the presence of courage, but I’m not aware of being particularly courageous. I
mostly feel scared a lot. But I wrote this book because I felt driven to, and I
wanted to try to solve certain structural and creative issues that I had
thought about a lot in terms of memoir as a genre, and I wanted people to get
to meet, in some sense, my friend who had died, and so I didn’t really have a
lot of analytical self-reflection about how brave or not the writing was while
I was doing it.
Tell
us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
Ahhhhh so many highs, which are never
high enough. A starred Publisher’s Weekly
review. Being on various lists - Entertainment
Weekly and Nylon’s top 50 2019
books list. Tremendously beautiful blurbs. Knowing that I accomplished my
lifelong dream. And then lows - the only lows that I’ve felt have been entirely
self-inflicted, and all about envy and ego and self-confidence. For instance,
yesterday I got the February issue of O
Magazine, and wasn’t in it (I hadn’t expected to be, but hope lights the
heart forever), and I felt an acute sense of rejection and loss. I had to reach
out and ask a friend with experience to remind me that I don’t need to be in
charge of my book. I did my job, which was writing it. The rest is out of my
hands.
What’s
your favorite piece of writing advice?
It really helps if you need to write
to live - I became a working journalist fifteen years ago and knew that if I
didn’t land a pitch or file a story, I couldn’t afford rent. It compressed any
creative fear that I might have had, and gave me a really pragmatic approach to
writing. So when I sold my book, I just very pragmatically did my job and met
my deadlines. I like a very clear exchange of work and money, and I like to
need to write in order to afford my life.
My
favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What
surprised you in the writing of this book?
How linear I was able to make
extremely non-linear experiences. I have pages and pages of attempted
structural outlines, and notes of conversations with my editor, and it felt
like it was totally impossible to get a clear narrative out of the events that
had occurred and the way that I felt about them, but here we are, with a story
that goes from A to B to C, that has a beginning and an ending.
How
do you approach revision?
I wrote about 47 drafts - so I love
revision. I approach it with a lot of enthusiasm - something I learned from
working with editors for years. A good editor can feel like a miracle worker;
my book editor is truly the best. With this, I went over and over and over the
text until I felt like I had the basic map, and then I started doing
chapter-level revisions, then got more and more granular. I would often email
sections to myself and purposefully read them while I was distracted - on the
BART or walking around - to see how it felt. For the last few months, I read it
out loud to myself every night before I went to sleep to feel which sections
dragged or felt boring/obvious. I wrote the book in many parts over a period of
a few years, and I think that the last few months of reading it through / out
loud smoothed out so many of the potentially rough edges.
Inquiring
foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your
book? (Any recipes to share?)
The famous Milk Bar birthday cake cake
makes two appearances!!!! When I was slipping into a coma, the last thing I
thought to myself I wanted to do was - finally make that cake. Two years later,
I did. It took three days but I did it! The recipe is here: https://milkbarstore.com/recipes/birthday-cake/
[EDITOR’S NOTE: You must click over
and look at the picture of this cake!]
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR: www.evahagbergfisher.com
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