Is This a Novel or a Memoir? Making the Choice, With Sloane Tanen

Today on QWERTY podcast we’re talking to the creator of the best-selling book, Bitter with Baggage Seeks Same, which is how you might know Sloane Tanen, but you should know her from her new novel called There’s a Word for That, just out by Little, Brown. In this interview, we want to explore whether you should write your tale as a novel or as a memoir. She turned to fiction instead of memoir for this book, even though some of her life story sounds like what she takes on in her novel.

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Our Interview With Sloane Tanen

Marion:  Sloane, it’s such a joy to have you with us today. I’m delighted that you were able to come. Thank you so much.

Sloane:  Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to be here.

Marion: Good. I know you as one of the few polymaths that I honestly do know. In other words, I have a painting of yours that hangs in my house that I just adore, that I pass every single day.

Sloane: You do? I didn’t know that. Did I know that?

Marion:  Yeah, you did. You gave it to me.

Sloane:  Oh.

Marion:  You have these nine illustrated and Young Adult books. I mean, there was a time when I couldn’t ride the New York City subway without looking up and seeing those remarkable Easter chicks of yours that you turned into dioramas, that you then turned into books. I remember seeing these for a good long time. You’ve got visual art and prior books that did so well, and you have such a wide variety of talent. Honestly, my first question has to be, so what gets a woman to choose fiction, arguably one of the difficult things in the world to do?

David:  Absolutely.

Sloane: I do think it took a long time to get here. You know, I was a painter for so many years after graduate school. I never took a writing course in my life, I still haven’t, and I think I was afraid to. I think in some sense, they were all baby steps along the way, getting to writing a novel, this novel. I did do a Young Adult novel before this one, but I think even that was a little bit of a sidestepping to sort of jumping into something that I was fundamentally really afraid of tackling head-on.

I think, you know, with the chick books, even those, when I think back, are a little bit autobiographical. You know, you’re in and you’re out. I sort of like the brevity of them, and I just never wanted to rest too long in one place. That felt really scary to me, and painting is visual. It’s something I’m very comfortable with, more comfortable with, probably more confident in finally, so that was a good place for me to be.

I might have stayed there longer, had circumstances not come about to made that really just an impossibility for me. I knew I kind of had to turn to writing. There’s not that much I’m good at, you know, other than sort of the creative stuff.

David: Says the polymath. Says the polymath.

Sloane: Well, you know, like sitting in an office, I was like a deer in the headlights, every job I had. I would be like the nightmare assistant, right, who they would say, “FedEx this and make sure it gets there tomorrow,” and I was like, “Where are the slips?” You know?

David:  You’re Anne Hathaway in Devil Wears Prada.

Sloane:  100%, and there was no arc, right? It all was just bad, bad, bad, and then I would get fired, so I needed to figure out something to do that, you know, would allow me not to feel like a complete and total loser in the world. I think a lot of people sort of turn to the arts as a way … it’s a place for people who are fearful to go, and often those people have a lot to say, but it’s hard to find what that voice is going to be.

You know, I think if you do have a talent, maybe, or a proclivity for different sorts of mediums, it’s even harder and it takes longer to get there. This may or may not be that place for me, but right now it feels like it is. It’s taken a long time to get here, but, you know, things change.

David: This is interesting, the growth of an artist, because I was in art. I was a photographer. I was an artist and writer …

Sloane: Oh, I didn’t know that.

David:   … a web developer, now doing video stuff. I never plotted where I was going, I call it the ice floe theory of career. I’m on an ice floe, and then suddenly I bump into another ice floe and I’m like, “Oh, I’d better step off and do this one,” and it takes me in an entirely different direction.

Sloane:  Definitely.

David:   Did you have a secret desire to always be a writer, or was it sort of kind of bumping ice floe to ice floe until you became a writer?

Sloane:  I think it was a combination of both. I think if I look back on being a kid, I remember getting a pen and a pad of paper from my best friend’s mother for some graduation, maybe from grammar school, saying, “I know this is your path.” I used to write poems, whatever it was I was doing, and that scared me, right? I was too afraid of that somehow. It felt too easy to judge or to justify, and it felt so, I think, intimidating.

Sloane: Because I’m a big reader, and everybody else’s voice seemed to self-assured. It felt too scary to me, so I think I would jump on various blocks of ice and try to sort of circumvent what maybe was where I should have been going all along. You know, it’s funny. I think you end up landing where you’re supposed to be eventually.

David:  I think at a particular time, too.

Sloane:  Exactly.

David:  You know, being a writer 30 years ago may not have worked for you.

Sloane:  Well, I think that’s true too. I also had a real preoccupation with being taken seriously. I was in academia for a really long time. I went to college and then I went into a PhD program, and I ended up not finishing the PhD program and taking two masters instead, because it wasn’t really right for me, any of those things, but I felt like I had something to prove, I think.

You know, even with the chickens, which did really well, they were really successful commercially, I had this sort of shame around it, like it wasn’t … like my dad had put me through graduate school and spent God knows how much money paying for that, and then I went and wrote some chicken books? Right?

David:   Yeah.

Marion:  Yeah.

Sloane:  There’s always this kind of … and I think there’s that fraud complex that we all have.

David: Yes, we all have.

Sloane: All of those things sort of were this perfect storm of feeling kind of lost and jumping around, and not diving into a novel.

Marion: I’m so glad you did. I tell my writers, the writers I work with all the time, that writing from counterphobia is the single greatest place to write from.

Sloane:  Oh, is it? Oh, good. That’s good to know.

Marion:  Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I walked into an autopsy years ago as part of a book I was writing, and I pass out when I get my own blood drawn, so what I was able to bring to the autopsy was kind of what you would bring to the autopsy, which is, “Oh, no. They’re opening the drawer. Oh, God.” That I think has probably served you really well, so I’m sorry for all the fear. I’m really glad for it as a reader, because it gives us this really immediate and fantastic response you have throughout this story, so let’s talk about that. I mean, this new book is called There’s a Word for That, and I think David wanted to ask you a question about how you got there, right?

David: Yes. I mean, most of the world … if not, they will know after this … know your dad was a very famous Hollywood producer, that you were in Hollywood and around that world at the pinnacle of those young adult movies like 16 Candles, the John Hughes movies, and so you were there while it was all going on, and so much of that happens in this book. Now, my question is, did this come because you decided not to write a memoir about what happened? What was the decision to make it fiction versus talking from a first-person point of view?

Sloane: I don’t think of it so much as a Hollywood novel as a novel that takes place in Hollywood. It’s a family story, and it’s a family story that takes place 30 years after these people have succeeded or had their moment in Hollywood, or are sort of past their prime. I did very much grow up in a Hollywood landscape, but my day-to-day experience was not one of, you know, Golden Globe awards and parties.

My father very much believed in keeping a remove. His family … which is in the book … that he really didn’t want us to be a part of that. He didn’t fundamentally think it was a healthy place for a family and his children to be. He sort of loathed the world, I think, as much as he profited from it, and as much as he deeply loved movies. Not only did I grow up there, he actually produced those John Hughes movies, so I knew John Hughes. You know, not very well, but I knew him a bit.

The sort of childhood, teenage angst of it all was very real, and I think the way it plays out in the book is very real, but it’s not really about Hollywood. It’s just I picked the location because it was familiar. Like Lorrie Moore says, you sort of take what ingredients are in the cupboard, right, and use them, but it certainly wasn’t … it’s not autobiographical, I wouldn’t say, at all. There is pieces, but it’s not a story drawn directly, by any means.

I never thought about making it a memoir, to answer your question. It never occurred to me, I don’t think, to do that. I think I would have been afraid to do that probably, fear of sort of capitalizing on events that had happened in the name of art, but I think also the fear that the events weren’t bad enough or significant enough to be memoir-worthy, you know, on some level, if that’s a thing. It’s definitely not an autobiography, but it’s fictionalized, heavily fictionalized, I would say, if that answers.

Marion:   Uh-huh. Let’s talk about that cupboard that Lorrie Moore, the great fiction writer Lorrie Moore, talks about. She talks about … and I love that you quote her. She’s one of my very favorites. You talk about take what ingredients are in the cupboard, so when you go to that cupboard that is life, your own life, and then your own imagination, and then everything you’ve ever read and everything you’ve ever felt, thought, smelled, tasted, heard, it’s a damn big cupboard. You know, selection, so writing is more about what you leave out than what you put in, ultimately of course, so let’s talk about that process of selection. You’re taking a little bit of the landscape, as you called it, in which you grew up, and then a lot of the intent for each of these characters, and how you make those selections fascinates me. It’s about discernment, I guess.

You say you didn’t ever take a writing course, so how did you learn, for instance, to draw your protagonist? How did you learn what she would say, what she would respond to, how she would react, scene by scene? Let us just talk a little bit about teaching yourself to do this so well, so well that it’s a major novel coming out in American publishing by Little, Brown. Talk about the process a little bit, about going to the cupboard of all of it and selecting what you needed for one character. Let’s do that.

Sloane:  I’ll pick Janine, because she’s probably the character who’s the closest to me. There’s I think six characters in the book, so there’s a lot of points of view that I move in and out of, but I think she’s the closest to me as a character. I think it’s about, you know, making the personal universal and sort of figuring out the demarcations between invention and appropriation on some level, but more I think what is … how did I feel growing up.

Was I a childhood television star? No. Did I live like a recluse in New York? No. Did I have that strained a relationship with my father or my sister? No, but did I have her fear? Did I have her insecurity? Did I have her sense of self-aggrandizement? It’s more the feelings that I had and have experienced, as applied to a character. You know, how to make somebody universally understood, right, and I think because finally that’s what makes a character interesting.

You know, not to harp on the chickens, but those felt very personal to me. I was very surprised at the reception of those chickens, because to me they were very weird and they were very personal. You know, there was one about the crush I had on my therapist, and I thought he was just playing around with me. I thought he was just pretending that it was transference. I’m like, “Come on, you know you like me,” you know, and he didn’t, but I was sure he did. I put that in the book as, you know, a two-line joke, and lots of people responded and that was a favorite of people.

Marion:  Well, my therapist really did like me.

Sloane: Oh, see? Lucky you. That’s all I wanted. I still think he did like me. I’m convinced he did.

Marion:  He’s a liar.

Sloane: Yeah. Again, I think it’s, you know, what is the collective experience? What are those things that we all feel? Of course, not everything appeals to everybody, and not everybody can relate. There are people who come out of the womb confident and self-assured and they know exactly what they want do, or they appear that way, and that’s a different kind of character. That’s not an experience I personally had, and none of my characters in the book reflect that except for Bunny, probably, who is very self-assured and very confident and is sort of the antithesis of Justine … Janine.

Her name changed at the last minute in the book, so if I trip on that, that’s why. I can get into why later if you want me to, but she was so much fun to write. I would say she was the most fun character to write, because she was the least like me. It was like this complete … I just felt totally liberated, because I think next to all these ingredients that we know are the ingredients we never use, right? Like the flavors we …

David: That’s a great point.

Sloane:   It’s so fun to experiment with something totally different.

David:  What I find so fascinating about what you’re saying is this notion of a cupboard and the ingredients that are right next to the ones we always use and we’ve not used in a long time, is I’m beginning to sort of feel out fiction, and no matter what I do, no matter how extreme I make the characters, no matter how extreme I make the situations, it’s my family. I can’t escape that. I find it fascinating, which I asked you about memoir versus the novelization of your life or something completely different. I don’t know how to escape that, and Marion’s read some of this stuff and she’s like, “This is your mom. An extreme version, but it’s your mom.” I find that fascinating, how you could have so many overlaps of circumstance or environment, and yet you went off on a very different tack.

Sloane:  Well, I think if you can find someone in your life who maybe isn’t as close or a part of your direct family or your direct experience … somebody you know, even somebody you’ve had a conversation with, somebody you’ve read about, somebody you’ve seen on TV … and imagine what that life is, right? I think that is the fun part in some way, because you get away from all these people that are in your head all the time, right? I think you can do it.

I agree with you in terms of the memoir angle. I need a starting point, so there is somebody I had in mind for Bunny, but she’s certainly not … she’s modeled on her, but it’s absolutely not her, and it was fun to not be shackled by any obligation to get it right, if that makes sense.

David: Yeah.

Marion: Oh, that’s lovely. I love that. The fictional version, the fiction world in which you live, it’s fun to not be shackled by the need to get it right, and yet you can draw from the cupboard of your own understanding and experience. In that, I think you give people a really fabulous set of points with which to make this, their images. It’s a combo platter, and some of the stuff you’ve never used before is a terrific idea.

Marion:  When you write about … and we can set up who these characters are a little bit for everybody. It’s a family drama. There’s an ex-wife, Bunny. She’s big. She’s really big in this book, and there are these daughters and there’s this father, and there’s a son. Bunny has a son, and so there’s a regular cast of characters. As you found yourself taking from the person on whom you modeled Bunny and adding to Bunny … and Bunny is big and good, and I can just about smell her perfume from here … are you adding things because the story needs them, I’m assuming, or are you adding things because … well, I don’t know.

I assume you’re adding things because the story needs them. The story needs them because she has to do certain things to provoke other things, so it’s a chess game. It’s interlocking, strategic, and so how do you make all those decisions? You make Bunny more Y because you need her to provoke the man she used to be married to to do certain things. I mean, how in the world do you make all that work together?

Sloane: Again, I never took a writing class, so I didn’t know that certain points had … I don’t know the dominos had to be set up in such a way to knock over to make things happen as they should. I didn’t really realize that until I was done, and the book was 800 pages, my first draft.

David:  Wow.

Marion: That is no nice of you to tell everybody, 800 pages.

Sloane:   I thought I wrote the Great American Novel, you know, and nobody agreed.

Marion:   You and Theodore Dreiser were kind of competing for poundage?

Sloane:  Exactly. Side by side.

Marion:   Sister Carrie?

David:  I hope you got your advance by pound, based on pounds.

Sloane:  I will say, what I did is I would just sit down and write a character a day. Whoever I was in the mood to spend my day with is the character I would write. I had an idea that they would seamlessly all lock together and I would have my narrative, so each character had their general arc and this was going to happen, and then this was going to happen and then this was going to happen, and it was going to receive and land in the perfect place, and of course that isn’t what happened at all.

I can remember so clearly. It was Rosh Hashanah, and my husband had read the draft, and he was afraid to come in and tell me that all of the characters were basically on different planets. One was on Mars in the morning, and one was on Uranus in 1988. The other … you know, they were different. Nothing … it was not going to work, so we had to do … and he helped me with this, because I am not a math-y person as all, and so the minute it becomes a question of logistics, it’s like I’m in 10th-grade geometry or whatever it was and I just freeze.

We had to lay out a butcher block and do a timeline, and I had to figure out. Remember, 800 pages, right? When this happens to this character, this needs to be happening to that character, right, at the same time, and it’s all going to sort of clock together and work.

I can’t tell you how upsetting that was. That was the first hiccup in a road of many more to come, but it was the first time I realized the benefit of an outline, and that it would have been smarter to think of these characters in terms of how they affect one another rather than how they exist in and of themselves. I don’t remember what your original question was, because I didn’t just answer it, I know that.

Marion: No, you answered it. Then the butcher block moment, the moment of aha, that they all drop into the same place, how many pages did you go … you went from 800. In the next go-through, do you remember what you dropped down to?

Sloane:  I dropped down to 700, and that felt painful.

David:  “We’re getting there. We’re moving in the right direction.”

Sloane:   That involved not only cutting, but I had to write more, right, because I had to add things that would weave them together again.

Marion:  Of course, yeah.

Sloane:  I had to add more, and it’s hard to let things go, as you know, when you’re writing something. I actually handed the book in to my agent at 700 and, you know, slapped my hands together and patted myself on the back for a job well done, you know? Little did I know what was coming, right, which was I had to go back and restructure things. She loved it, and was so supportive right off the bat, and she’s very honest and I trust her. When she said, “You’ve got to cut this down, we cannot hand in a 700-page manuscript, and it needs more tension … ” oh, I know how this goes back to your original question.

The characters, I love. I’m not so interested in a plot. I don’t ever read for plot. I’m not a mystery reader. I’m really only interested in character, so I somehow took that to mean, well, I can just write about characters. It doesn’t matter what happens, plot is irrelevant. Well, I guess that’s not true in a novel, or a memoir, I assume. Nobody wants to sit in the same place with the same people. Maybe in like a Sartre novel or something, but not here and now.

I had to go back and figure out what is going to happen. How do you make those characters larger or smaller, or how do you fine-tune the events in their life and the characteristics of their personality to propel the story forward and to keep readers engaged in what’s happening? Because nobody is … I don’t know. You know, I read a lot of old British novels that are not about much at all, so I am sort of on the fence with the theory that things have to happen, but I guess even if they’re tiny, they have to happen.

I will say the book, the plot became much bigger than I had every anticipated, just in the way it had not started out as a book that was going to be autobiographical at all. It sort of turned into one that was more autobiographical, so things change through the process of writing.

David: That was part of my question, because I find that the more I write, even when it’s something very distant from myself, the more I bring it back to my world … I guess I’m just a great narcissist. I see everything through my own lens.

Sloane:  Well, we all do, right?

David:  Yeah, and I think that there’s so much truth to that, and that’s what’s so fascinating to me. Because when I wrote my memoir, I couldn’t change the fact that I’m an only child and I’m Portuguese and I grew up in Massachusetts. I couldn’t change any of that, and I find when I do have the freedom to change all of it, I do go way out there, and then I start bringing that long-casted line very close to shore. I just find it utterly fascinating.

Sloane: I think that’s very true, and it feels comfortable and right, the more you bring it back, right?

David: Yes, because I think you can really be … one of the things that Marion and I have talked about many times is the more specific, the more universal. The more specific you can make that story, the more universal. I think for me at least, with my own writing … of course, it was a memoir … the more specific of my own life, the more people could relate to it.

Sloane:  I think that’s very true, but don’t you also think that within that familiar place, you actually do have room to play, as long as you keep the emotional stuff true? The facts don’t have to be the same.

David:  Right. Right, but in memoir, you need to keep to the facts and keep to the emotional truth. Of course there’s how you look at it, because you’re looking back on 20 years, 30 years, in my case I think 40 years. You start looking back, and then you can start coloring and shading the perspective, but I couldn’t change what happened.

Sloane:   No, of course not.

David:  I always thought that I really craved that wide-open freedom of fiction writing, and when I started doing it, I was mortified. I had literary agoraphobia, and I wanted to go right back to the place that I knew so well, which was my own world and my own family.

Sloane:   That’s such a good way to put it, and I think that’s so true, but I’m always amazed by people like Stephen King, right, who clearly go out and don’t do that, right? Or Joyce Carol Oates, where the imagination is so big, and yet somehow … I mean, especially with Joyce Carol Oates, we all can connect. There’s something very familiar, and some of it may all be her story, but is that true of Stephen King? That’s a scary thought, and it can’t be, right?

David:  Right. A very scary thought.

Marion:  No, of course not, but it’s true of his fears or his thoughts.

Sloane: Exactly, right. The fears are collective. We’ve all had them, and he’ll tap into something you didn’t even know you had, right, and you’re like, “Oh, I am scared of that,” right? “That would be really harrowing.”

Marion:  Absolutely.

David: Then the expression of those fears is what you’re talking about, kind of a wiggle room that you have in how you write about it, the expression of how that fear is done. Whether we’re afraid of a clown or whether we’re afraid of a car that comes to life or a cemetery in which pets come back to life, those are the expressions of that fear.

Sloane:  Exactly.

Marion: Now, wait. We left me hanging at my greatest fear, which is a 700-page manuscript. Let’s just go back.

David:  There’s a whole novel in that.

Marion: Some number of years this took you, some number of months this took you? This is a process of rewrite, and clarifying what it is that you needed to do. You’ve got a husband who makes you lay it out on the butcher block, you’ve got an agency who says, “Okay, now let’s boil it down.” You go back to the desk and you start to boil it based on how these people, as you said, have to work together. They have to work together toward this experience. How long did the book take for you to write?

Sloane:  The writing didn’t take that long. The writing, I would say, took about a year and a half. The editing took almost … I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I think it probably was about three years.

Marion:  What did you learn in particular? What’s the thing, when you come away and you say … you know, like we learn things when we go through anything. What do you know after what you’ve been through?

Sloane: I want to say outline, that you should definitely draw up an outline, but I don’t even know that I will do that next time, because I liked being taken by surprise and not knowing where my characters were going to go. That was the fun part, I think, but I think you should know what it is you want to say. I think you should have an argument, and you should know what each character wants to say. It doesn’t have to be, you know, you, necessarily. It can be the opposite of what you think, but they need to argue it and argue it believably and well. I think those are important things.

Marion:  That’s a good one.

Sloane:  When I think like what I would do differently, I think it would be I would definitely need some sort of a map, in my head at least, of where the landing place was, because I just had so much fun writing. I had the most fun writing this book and the worst time editing it, so it was like the two sides of it. The fun part got left behind a long time ago, right?

Once I got a good editor, after I threw my fits and got over the huge task in front of me, it was fun to go in and make it work, because you could feel it when it starts to work again, and you get too separated and distant from that place where good things are happening when you’re in the weeds with editing. It can be miserable. I mean, you just want to burn the whole thing and say, “This isn’t for me, I’m not doing this anymore,” right? Then it changes and it feels good again, and that’s a really great moment.

You know when you’re in the hands of a good editor and when you’re in the hands of not a good editor, or not a not-good editor, but you know when somebody’s sort of saying what you want to hear or they’re kind of pussyfooting around the issues. Then when somebody comes in with a cleaver and you want to die, you know, once you take the time to absorb it, that they know what they’re doing, and now you have to listen and do the work.

David:  Were you surprised as you were writing, because it sounds as if you were … what do they call them, Marion, pantsers … you know, just sitting down and letting the story take you, kind of flying by the seat of your pants, letting the characters lead you and the story lead you. Were you surprised, when you finished your 800-opus …

Sloane: The behemoth.

David:   … that there were these imageries and there was these themes and even certain language constructs that started tying into each, that you didn’t realize that you were doing, but you were admitting something throughout the whole process?

Sloane:  100%. That’s very true, and I will say … and this may speak to the memoir aspect of things … the first thing to go, there were a lot of flashbacks in the book, a lot. They were actual chapters that were interspersed, that were from the ’70s and the ’80s, and those were the first things to go, and I felt like that information was really necessary. Realizing that it wasn’t necessary and that you could just sprinkle it in was devastating, because those, I thought, were some of the best chapters because they felt … a lot of them were more autobiographical, and it was so fun to invent conversations that might have happened, and then I didn’t get to put them in there and that felt so upsetting.

I would go read The Corrections or A Little Life. You know, people who do that so well, who just weave it in so seamlessly, and you’re not even aware that you’re sort of in a flashback, right? It wasn’t graceful enough the way I had done it, but I learned how to layer that in. A lot of that was the more personal material, I think, the stuff that had happened in the past.

Marion:  Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections does the flashback beautifully. For me, Elena Ferrante in the My Brilliant Friend series, she’s walking down the street at 60 and suddenly she’s six, in the same sentence.

Sloane:  Exactly.

Marion:  The way she moves in time is breathtaking.

Sloane:  It is breathtaking, and you’re not aware of it.

Marion:  You’re not aware of it, so you learned some skills. You threw yourself into this novel. You wrote 800 pages. You threw it onto a butcher block, you smacked it down to 700. You kept getting down, getting down, getting down further and further, learning a new set of skills. Are they going to be applied to another book?

Sloane:  Definitely. Definitely, and I already have some ideas that I have going forth, but it’s funny because I think previously, the books I was thinking about doing were farther away from me. Like you were saying, David, now I think they’re going to come a little bit back to home.

David:  Close to you?

Sloane:  I think so, because I think it’s what … it’s finally what always works, unless you’re writing fantasy, right, or you’re writing a completely different genre. For me, I just think that’s going to be the most authentic experience. I really do think it’s very tricky when you are modeling characters on specific people, and I don’t know what kind of advice you give to people about that sort of thing, but I think that’s always really hard.

I think, you know, again, with the character that wasn’t somebody I was modeling on, they were much easier to write. When it was somebody that I knew or was a real person in my life, even if it was a long time ago, I felt … you know, we all have these sort of dualities, and capturing that somebody could be so kind and so awful, or so funny and so, you know, brutal. Whatever the duality is for a specific person, you really have to … I felt so much pressure to get that right when it was somebody real in my life. I think it just came more naturally when it was someone that I didn’t know.

That, I think, is a really big challenge, because you don’t want to betray that person. It’s not a matter of betraying their secrets, it’s a matter of betraying … because even if the character represents somebody who’s moving the plot along in a negative way, in order to make the character likeable or empathic or somebody the reader cares about, you have to show the good side of that person, and it has to be real, the way it’s done. I think that’s a hard thing to do, and it’s something you really want to honor when it’s somebody you loved, especially.

David: I think that’s very true in memoir. The one thing I find so refreshing, Sloane, and I think this will really be very useful to our listeners, is your authenticity and your humility and your honesty about the process, about really having gone in and not really knowing how to do this, and how you chipped away it and chipped away at it. I think a lot of writers, myself included … I had never written a memoir, and here I am with a 120-something-thousand-word manuscript, a book that ended up being published.

I didn’t know how to do it, and I think that you’re giving people permission to stumble and to learn by themselves, to learn from their mistakes, and not feel that they have to go through 15 years of being a writer before they can really truly write the memoir or the novel they want to write. I think that’s really a great takeaway for our listeners.

Marion:  I think so too.

Sloane:  I’m glad, and I think it’s really so true. I think the most important thing is to keep your voice, because whenever that starts to slip away from you, then you have nothing. Then you better have taken some writing courses or be listening to lots of podcasts or reading. I don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing, because if you don’t have a voice and a point of view, you don’t have anything. If you have that, that’s something that isn’t … it’s not really teachable, right? It’s something you have, and most people have it, right? It’s just a matter of getting it on the page.

Marion:  The book is There’s a Word for That, out now from Little, Brown. Please subscribe to the QWERTY podcast, and you can listen to us on the go. Thanks so much for coming by today.

More from Sloane Tanen

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