You Have To Be Willing To Go Anywhere

An interview with Sloane Crosley

Tonight I’m doing a free craft talk on zoom via Write or Die (details here). Get in there and ask questions and get prepped for the Mini 1000 or this year’s #1000wordsofsummer, which starts June 1!

I wrote a newsletter about 48 hours in the life of a book idea for my other newsletter project, and I thought you might be interested in it, so I removed it from the paywall: A Pep Talk for the Rest of My Life.

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Hi friends.

I was thinking this morning that I have known Sloane Crosley, for probably a decade or so, perhaps before she became a bestselling essayist and novelist, and I checked my email and our first exchange was in 2010, and then I remembered I probably knew her even before that, because I definitely read her column in the Village Voice and saw her around town during that time, and I remember giving her a compliment on something she had written once, and she started writing that column in 2004.

However, it is impossible that either one of us is that old, so let’s just say we met last week.

But of course Sloane’s new memoir, Grief is for People, is too wise to have been written by someone just starting out in the world. It is my favorite of her books. The freshest of takes on a grief memoir. It is about the loss of a friend and a break-in in her apartment, but, of course, so much more than that. It is beautiful and emotional and honest and witty and moving. The book is also, in parts, a frank and inside baseball discussion about the publishing industry, which I think a lot of you might find of interest.

If you want to pre-order a signed copy of Grief is for People, do it here. It comes out next week. She generously answered a few questions for me.

Do you have any baseline advice for people who are writing through the tough emotional stuff as you did so beautifully? I suspect you leveraged wit and humor as a starting point, but I wonder if you had any conversations with yourself or created any special boundaries before you tackled this book and this tricky subject matter?

I’m so tempted to write “beta blockers” and that’s my whole response here, but I suppose that temptation is why you’re asking. I knew that the harder emotional material would come for me and there was no sense in prepping for it, trying to build it a neat little house for when it arrived. Actually, I tried to avoid that. Because I felt it would shave off the truth. Which humor can do anyway, that’s the downside of it. So you’re already in danger of “making light” and I wanted to let the tricky subject matter be tricky.

In that way, writing about difficult topics is no different than writing about easy ones. You have to be willing to go anywhere. You can always take it out later. No one was in the room when I would burst into hysterics while typing a la Diane Keaton in “Something’s Gotta Give.” I think the lines and passages when that happened are very obvious. Maybe not. Though, this is new territory for me – I would never tell you if I laughed at my own jokes, and maybe telling you I cried at my own story is the same thing.

When I wrote my memoir I thought it was going to be one kind of book when I wrote the proposal, and by the end I saw it turn into something else. Did this book turn out how you thought it would or was there any kind of surprising evolution along the way?

I haven’t had anything pour out of me like this in some time. Though that phrase…such a douchey expression. Do people still say “douchey?” Too bad, it applies here. Things don’t really “pour out” for more than a minute before they have to be unclogged. Everyone knows this. But the beginning was like this. Just going along at a speedy clip, feeling urgent.

Two major exceptions: I was thinking about writing about the burglary and how when Russell died. So obviously yes, that was a very surprising evolution. The other is the end of the book. Part five. I didn’t see how it would leap forward or the shift in tone and audience. That was not planned.

I know you get asked this consistently (and I do too) but I have to know if you prefer writing non-fiction to fiction. What do you get out of either genre? Where does your heart lie, Sloane Crosley?

Oh, I bet you get asked this constantly. I really don’t have one I prefer over the other. When one unpacks groceries, certain things go in the fridge and certain things go in the cabinet and it’s all very obvious. To extend this silly analogy, there are tons of ingredients that can go anywhere. So there are little true stories or lines or observations that wind up in fiction. But in general, you’re not going around putting milk in the spice cabinet unless you’re completely deranged. Which…go for it, you experimental fool!

Have a good week, all you experimental fools.

Jami

p.s. This week’s donation went to the Louisiana School for the Deaf Foundation in honor of our friend Sara Nović’s book True Biz being chosen for One Book, One Philadelphia.

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on twitter and instagram.