From Research to Writing a Book, with Anne Kreamer

Anne Kreamer is the writer we all want to speak with right now. The author of one book on navigating emotion in the new workplace, another on the risk/reward ratio of taking intelligent leaps in your professional life, and  — wait for it — another book on going gray, her work covers three big themes faced during in the Covid infection. Anne has a solid marketing and entrepreneurial background and brings those skills to her writing. Listen in and read along as we discuss the trajectory from research to writing a book.

Marion: This author profile makes her the single person you want to slide into a diner booth with right now and talk the day away except, of course, we’re amid the COVID shut-in and we can’t do that right now. What we can do is this and welcome her to Qwerty. Hi Anne.

Anne: Hi Marion. How are you?

Marion: I’m good. How are you?

Anne: I have established routines that allow me to get through the day with some modicum of sanity.

Marion: Good. Well, you got to admit it that your books rather make you the authority of all things we’re dealing with right now, our workspaces, our risk tolerance, and our hair. So let’s set this up a bit though because in one interview I read with you, you’re referred to as a serial entrepreneur, which is true. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, you were a part of the team that distributed and co-produced Sesame Street around the world. You were part of the team that launched the single greatest magazine ever — Spy magazine — arguably the most influential magazine of the 1980s.

And in the ’90s, you were executive vice president and worldwide creative director for Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite. You became a columnist for the magazine, Fast Company and for Martha Stewart Living and then come the books, all of which reference your own career in some way as well as use the skills you learned in like reading data, performing interviews, sampling the public’s opinions and trends. So chicken and the egg question to open with. Were you taking notes all along the way in your professional career with an eye toward writing books or did something in your life just say, “Oh, next I want to publish?”

Anne: There were a couple of strands in this. I certainly was not taking any notes, although the kind of germ of all of the books would be from a pivotal emotional moment of stress in my life. And so those kinds of memories are laid down with greater effect in your mind. And so it was pretty easy for me to access them when I decided to try and write about them. But in my life, I never thought I was going to be a writer. I live with a writer and the idea that I could exist in that same sphere was somewhat terrifying to me. But I also began to become extremely disillusioned with corporate America. I realized at a certain point the only person I could work for anymore in my life was me. So I had no choice.

I had no choice except as like figure out, well, okay, maybe I can do this writing thing. So it was a leap of faith.

Marion: I get that. I had that happen to me just a lot earlier. The personal politics of working at the New York Times got to me in my 20s and I was just jettisoned right out of ever wanting to work for anybody else ever again. So I get that.

Anne: Yep.

Marion: I mean, it makes perfect sense. And we should say that you live with a writer, Kurt Andersen, who’s a wonderful novelist, a fantastic historian, and the host of Studio 360, which we’ve just kissed goodbye. That was my favorite radio show ever too. So cool. But yeah, that would be a little intimidating I guess. But your books are so different, but I can see that if you hear the screaming from behind the closed door on a regular basis, maybe you don’t want to be a writer.

Anne: No. What was really interesting about it, and there is a linkage here. So when we did Spy Magazine in the ’80s, he was on the editorial side and I was on the business side and it was one of those things that could have been the greatest mistake of our lives and led to divorce. But in fact, it was a just magnificent collaborative relationship. And so we’d already had a very good modus operandi when it came to working together. I had the benefit as an executive of watching his writing process and writing ethic. And so when I did make the decision to try and start writing, I already had a template and role model to mirror myself on.

So I wasn’t just making it up out of whole cloth and having no idea. And a lot of it was the adage that we all know, which is that you just have to sit down and do it. But I had a person in my household who did that every morning, so I was like, okay, I guess I’m going to go up and do that too. That was helpful.

Marion: I’m a huge believer in what I refer to as the S & M of writing, the hard chair, and you sit in it until you finish the damn thing. So it’s not all angels feathers and getting in touch with your right or left side of your brain. For me, in fact, none of that is true. It’s the work of it. And I think having someone in the house, my husband’s a newspaper editor, and no matter what, that newspaper comes out every day. So I get that. We get that role model thing that’s very, very important.

Well, when you published your first book, which is called Going Gray: What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Matters, which I just love that last phrase. Apparently you got a glimpse of yourself in a picture and it began a line of thought. How did that book rollout from getting a glimpse of yourself?

Anne: My very first job out of college was working in a bank. And at that moment, I started dyeing my hair a kind of aubergine color or a kind of bittersweet color and it was never quite clear, but I wanted to make it very clear to the banking management that I was an artist. I wasn’t one of them, some drastic mistake had happened and I had landed in this banking environment, but I really wasn’t one of them. I was an artist. And so my hair color was this crude tool I began to employ to establish identity. It went through multiple shades of, I was every color in the rainbow, kind of a blonde. And then when I turned 40, I dyed my hair jet black bemoaning the fact that I was never going to be a rockstar.

When I walked in the door that night, my kids who were four and six burst into tears because mommy’s evil twin had just come into the house and it was a disaster. So there had been a long practice of hair color associated with thoughts about identity and aging on some level. I was on a trip with two friends of mine, both of whom had gray hair and my then daughter who was 16 who had blonde hair and one of my friends sent a picture from there. And at that point in time, I dyed my hair this sort of helmet, mahogany color. And I just look at that photograph and I thought I looked dreadful. It was like I was in the middle of these two radiant hair colored people, blonde daughter and shiny gray haired friend.

And I was like a black vortex sucking all the light and energy out of the photograph. And I thought, huh, maybe I should see what my actually natural hair color is. And because I’m a coward, I went to a friend who was an editor at More Magazine at the time and I said, “Would you be interested in me trying to write about this?” And she said, “Yes.” And that piece produced more reader response mail for them than any piece they had published in their then entire 10 year history. And I thought, okay, this is a nerve, let’s see what this means. That led me on a journey because I really… who cares about hearing about how somebody let their hair go gray. That’s like watching paint dry in my opinion.

But what I realized in my process of letting my hair go gray is that it really touches on everything that’s central to society, to our norms, to our values, to our self-identity, to everything from aging to professional viability, to sexual attractiveness. And so the book, I dove in and created all of my own social science experiments because you’re right when you said in the introduction that I like to marry data with personal experience because I really wanted to know what women around the country were thinking and feeling about things.

So I did large national surveys and I did experiments on match.com, and I went back to head hunters and I just tried to roll up to authenticity and feel the large-forest-picture and then come down to my own individual trees perspective throughout the book.

Marion: Oh, that’s wonderful. So you really approach it from a cultural studies angle, making you the poster child for how to go from research to writing a book. And I found that fascinating. The data, the polling, ultimately setting up a dating site, sorry, not a data, but a dating site. A brilliant book launch differentiator. I mean, I’ve been through four book launches myself, but this one takes the proverbial wedding cake because it’s a total differentiator. So what was that about? And just give the listeners a bit of a sense of that.

Anne: All my friends when I was letting my hair grow were like, “Well, you’re lucky you’re married. If you had to date, you couldn’t do that.” So I thought, well, really is that true? Because I know several women with gray hair who were single and going out socially and having a fine time. And so the way I thought I could quantify it was to go on match.com with my hair, the mahogany color that I dyed it. And with all the information the same, although I did say on the profile that I was divorced, even though the entire family was part of the experiment. And then six months later, I went on with the exact same information except with my profile photograph with my hair gray.

In New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, three times as many men were interested in going out with me in my gray hair as they were with my dyed hair. And I had done the experiment because I thought it was going to validate everybody’s conventional wisdom about this, that no, of course they’re right. You have to dye your hair. And what I came away with was no, that’s not the case. I was on Good Morning America promoting the book and they repeated the experiment with lots of women around the country and they all had the same result too.

Marion: It’s fabulous.

Anne: What became clear was in 1950, 7% of women in America dyed their hair. By the time I conducted the research in 2008, fundamentally it was like 95% of women nationwide in every economic sphere that you could think of, every demographic dyed their hair. So what had happened in the interim from there was marketing. Then in the early days when Clairol introduced living color in the ’60s and women could dye their hair at home, we were going into the workforce for the first time in significant numbers and I think a lot of women associated dyeing their hair with empowerment and connected it with women’s liberation.

The marketing shifted that very quickly to if you… all the ads in the ’60s and ’70s were some drab housewife with, quote unquote, ‘mousy hair’ as they then dubbed everybody’s natural hair color, who was in the kitchen into her wrists with dirty dishes. And then she dyes her hair blonde, and the next thing you know, she’s on the beach in Bermuda with her husband.

Marion: She is.

Anne: And so that’s what we believed cluelessly and blindly.

Marion: Right. So you’ve got this remarkable evolution from this idea, this photo that you see with yourself to the data gathering, the reporting, the interviewing, and the book launch, which I just love, but we didn’t talk a lot about the writing yet. I assume you learned a great deal about yourself as you wrote. And so what advice can you give to writers about the agility we need to have as we write and learn about ourselves?

Anne: Well, I’m also going to add another note with this, that because of my corporate and business background, I always approach everything almost in a weird way as a competitive analysis. So I try to look at the overall marketplace of what exists in the area that I’m trying to write about and then I see if there are any gaps in the market that I think that I am uniquely qualified on some level to fill. And that is actually where these psychographic social tests that I created led me to because none of the books in this aging space or anything ever had any data like this that was tied to both a macro level and a personal level.

I also read all the extent books around aging and health and beauty and all those things before I ever put pen to paper. And those ideas gestate on some level. So as you’re doing your reading and your research, you’re thinking of things that lead you in different directions. The survey with match.com led to a completely different thought process and writing process for me. The books about aging led me to Betty Friedan’s extraordinary book, The Fountain of Age. In it, she was able to point out that the people who are most comfortable in their biological skin actually live longer. So in the writing of this, I began to think about, at the time I did it, I was in my late 40s, I’m now 64. So I’ve internalized a lot of this.

But at the time I was like, what do I think about aging? My mother had died very young, so I didn’t have her as a role model and I’m the mother of two daughters. And so it was, what kind of a woman do I want to represent for them? What kind of a sense of womanhood? So it was all that stuff. It was like, who am I? Who do I want to be? What kind of message do I want to send? What are my values? And that does come out in the writing.

Marion: It absolutely does. So I’m expecting you to give me a great deal help here in this. Here’s your ultimate social test. I’m a redhead and I feel like I’m losing my identity as I can’t get my hair done as we used to say in the 1950s I guess, but I don’t remember how many years I’ve been dyeing my hair to keep my hair the exact shade it was when I was 16. And so I’m right on top, right? Redheads are the worst at going gray according to you.

Anne: 100%. Yes.

Marion: Why? Why are we so bad at this end?

Anne: You are because you’re so few of you and so because the red hair becomes just almost synonymous with who you are. All I can offer to you in terms of this is moment of thinking about it is to me, having my natural hair color now was like gaining a super power. I genuinely feel like power courses through me from having this and not having to worry about my roots or who I am. This is who I am right now, so it’s about being fully present. One bizarre thing I discovered when I quit dyeing my hair is that so much of my time when I did dye it was, are people looking at my roots? It was all self-reflection of how people would be judging me on the state of my hair and roots.

With that eliminated, I no longer even think about what I look like. It’s always about looking at the other person and hearing them and thinking about them. It frees up bandwidth in your brain. It opens your horizons. It eliminates all the kind of negative self-criticism that we have running through our feedback loops in our mind, and it is… I had this fantasy the other day of imagine if all the women who are now isolated, sheltering in place as we say who cannot dye their hair were to say, “Okay, we’re not going to do it.” And we all walked out of our houses two months from now with our actual natural hair color.

The message that that would send to the planet of, hear us world. We are not going to be shackled by your narrow bandwidth of beauty standards. We are all beautiful and strong people. So get out of our way.

Marion: Oh, I’m smiling from earring to earring right now. Big lipsticky smile. So, there you go. Here I am wearing lipstick for a podcast. Of course, that’s me. Such a redhead thing to do. That’s great. And that personal, that whole idea of navigating our emotions is also so much behind your 2011 book, which is called, It’s Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace, which opens with this chest tightening tale of this wildly happy moment with your team at Nickelodeon and this huge success and the joy of bonding that is broken in an instant by a phone call. Can you tell us this story again, please?

Anne: Yeah. I mean, Nickelodeon was one of the great jobs in my life. I mean, my boss at the time, this woman, Gerry Laybourne, without a doubt was the best mentor I ever had. We had a great team. We were doing cool stuff for kids and I was running at the time the consumer products group and we’d done a big deal with Sony Music and the Wall Street Journal had covered it and the trades and covered it and it was the largest audio and video deal of its kind at the time. We’re celebrating and Sumner Redstone who still, I think shockingly, even cryogenically practically frozen in Los Angeles as he is at this point was then and is still the chairman of Viacom.

I thought he was calling, my assistant said, “Sumner’s on line one,” and I thought he was calling to congratulate me and instead he was calling to berate me for the fact that the announcement of this deal had not moved the Viacom share price. And so I went from euphoria to abject misery in 10 seconds basically. And then this horrible human being slams the phone down on me and his anger coming at me over the phone wire instantly triggered in me my fight or flight response. He was threatening me, he was attacking me. So all the hormones were going in my body. I now know this after all my research, but I was flooded with something and when he slammed the phone down, the only thing my body could do to dissipate that sense was to burst into tears.

I was part of the generation of women who had gone to work, which was whatever you do, do not let them see you cry. You will never-

Marion: Absolutely.

Anne:... be senior management material. And so I was ashamed of crying but really what I was was angry, like how dare you use son of a gun to call me up like that and say this when the… I was working within a division, within a division, within a division, within a division of a $6 billion company. So why a $20 million deal would move the share price is absurd, but this man felt entitled to call me and let off his anger in my direction. And I had no place. I couldn’t say to him what I wanted to say because I thought I would have been fired. And so all that rolled around in me and I cried and I told the team to go home. I went home and began to chew that over. And it was the isotope that planted the seed that caused me eventually to quit the job two years later.

It took me a while to get there. But that was the moment of like, I don’t want to work in a place like this. And one day I’m not.

Marion: But you went back and grabbed it as the opener of the book, which first of all was incredibly generous. I mean, that is exactly what it requires to write that book that we know that you have a reliability as a narrator, that we absolutely know that you know what this kind of rage and what this of shame and what this kind of anger engenders. Did you go back and call people and interview people who were in that room or did you just recreate it? Just help us through as writers recreating a scene like that?

Anne: I actually went back and called everybody and I cribbed that idea from the marvelous David Carr, who was a close friend of mine and ours who had written an incredible memoir called Night of the Gun. He was a journalist who had worked for a company that my husband had done called insight.com and then he went to The New York Times and he had struggled profoundly with addiction and drugs. And so he went back and interviewed all the people in his life during his dark ages. And I thought that was a really interesting idea because one of my things is, if we’re told we’re all losers, if we cry at work, I wonder if other people actually think that of us.

So I went back and I interviewed everybody who’d been in the room. I tried to interview Sumner, but of course, his press flak wouldn’t let me through to him, but oh, I so wanted to have him say, “Who are you? I don’t even remember you.” But one person in this group of eight or nine vaguely remembered, oh yeah, something happened. Nobody else did. And so what I learned in the research, again, I had to learn everything about neuroscience and memory and how we process and deal with emotions and retain them and lay them in deeper. And what I realized is that most people, because it was the end of the day, they left work, they went on with their life and they completely forgot about it.

It had nothing to do with them really. I went home and proceeded to rehash it with my husband and then just keeps thinking about it because it was so unfair and unjust. And so that memory was just stuck in me. One wants to also know, well, so why? So I again conducted these two significant national surveys to find out what people were thinking about emotion at work. And I found out at the time I was doing this, which is during the great recession, that 80% of people were miserable in their jobs. That didn’t come as a giant surprise at the time. But that in fact, there was no what I now call tissue sealing, that people at all levels of management reported that they had cried at work and that in fact 80% of people in the workplace view the expression of emotion as a positive attribute, that it signals empathy and compassion and humanity.

No one wants to work for a perfect person or a robot. We want to connect as human beings. And so this again, a little bit like the gray hair and the dating thing, there’s no foundation for this myth that if we cry on occasion in the workplace, we damage our professional trajectories.

Marion: Absolutely. It’s wonderful. I love the idea of going from this inkling, from these moments, from looking at the picture with your daughter and your gray haired friend, going from this long held memory, this very smoldering memory that you first decided to check out with everybody else and then learned that nobody else had the same emotional resonance with this thing and that yet you pursued it as a book because the data is what we needed on that. You’re absolutely right. So pitching it to your publisher, you started from when, when you had done some of the data research or when you just had the memory of the Sumner Redstone moment or where along the trajectory of knowledge did you pitch it as a book?

Anne: It was just with the notion and the same was true with the gray book, although because of the More Magazine piece, they had to document the kind of… they had data from that that like, oh, this is of interest to an audience. With the emotion book, I just really wrote up a two page, I had this moment, I would really like to understand how the genders do process and deal with emotion differently and why we all have these preconceived socially conditioned notions about what is required. My timing on that was also interesting because the science of emotion really only began to have any sort of credibility in academia after the year 2000 when FMRIs came into existence, people could begin to study actually living brains.

And so what the science was demonstrating is that you can’t even figure out what you want to wear to work or eat for breakfast without having your emotions involved. That emotions are central and integral to every single decision you make throughout the course of your day. And so this kind of industrial revolution 50s mad men, the working environment is a place of rationality and data and economics is specious because all of it includes our emotions and that what most gets in the way of people’s professional advancement and happiness is all this interpersonal stuff that is always simmering underneath the level and that people never deal with because we’re taught, well, it’s not there, but it is.

Marion: Sure it is. And it’s so rewarding having read the book to know that. And then you’d notch it up again, at least this is the way I look at the trajectory of these three books. You notch it up, in 2015 when you published, Risk/Reward: Why Intelligent Leaps and Daring Choices Are the Best Career Moves You Can Make, because unless you’re willing to take that emotional sleigh ride, there’s no way you’re going to make intelligent leaps and daring choices. Unless you’re willing to go with your emotions into your experience, there’s just no way. And you take us onto this deep dive into professional risk taking.

Again, I love the fact that you tested your emotional metal and then really gauged what risk tolerance is in the larger social science sense. So, what was it that you had noticed about risk and reward that assured you there was a book there?

Well, a lot of it was conditioned on the fact that with the time I was writing that, my children were entering the workforce and they entered the workforce in 2010 and 2012 and so they were coming in on the backs of the great recession. We had transitioned because of shareholder value, with breaking the contract with our employees, losing any sort of sense of permanence or loyalty or 401(k)s or all the things that are roiling our economy right now were really gaining traction in the late ’90s early aughts. And so I was watching my kids and their cohort try to get jobs and seeing how unstable and tenuous and the gig economy was destroying the potential futures I think for the entire swaths of our society.

I should backtrack, with every one of these books, because I have a marketing background, I had wanted to create a marketing partnership with the gray hair book with Dove Pro Age, which was just putting their products into the marketplace at the time. And I was trying to get distribution actually for my book in drugstore shampoo chain lines to open up a new channel of distribution. That didn’t really come to effect because packaged goods companies are really risk averse. But I got a great relationship with J. Walter Thompson when I was doing that. And a woman named Rosemarie Ryan who was then the head of J. Walter Thompson put me in touch with her head of research, this terrific man named Mark Trust.

And so he really helped me start doing all of my research and with the emotion book, J. Walter Thompson, and he was a professional who knew how to structure things and really had these large national cohorts of people who he could set up the surveys with. So that was a gift that was unique through the generosity of these people. With the emotion book, I wanted to do the same thing with Kleenex, which was one of their clients, again failed. But again, this extraordinary professional relationship with the head of research. And same thing with Risk/Reward, and J. Walter Thompson was able to get out of it, insight into consumer’s mindsets and trends that would be of benefit to their clients.

So even though we didn’t have a relationship that was a direct one-on-one marketing one, we were able to have… it was beneficial to both sides of the equation. So anyway, that’s a back step that you could do your own Survey Monkey things. I was fortunate to have a partnership by just truly like ringing doors and trying to see if I could get into agencies. Persistence actually matters a lot, Marion, in all of these things like picking up the phone a thousand times. If you’re doing an interview, they’re never going to call you back. You have to be relentless in following up on a variety of things.

Anne: So with the risk/reward book, I wanted to find out, well, what are the tools and the levers that can help someone prosper, someone like my kids prosper in this new, very tenuous, uncertain, no clear career paths, working environment? My kids were the catalyst for Risk/Reward more than myself.

Marion: Hm. So last time I checked in with you, you were thinking about writing fiction and you were starting a company with your daughter called Wild and Rare in which you design and make accessories that highlight the beauty of nature and raise awareness for our planet’s biodiversity. I love the company. I love the stuff. Is that what you’re doing? Are you also writing? Talk to me a little bit about this entrepreneur woman writing person with gray hair and what she’s doing now, please.

Anne: Well, it’s like my through-line in all this stuff has always been something that I see that isn’t happening and working. The Wild and Rare business started up because a couple of years ago, a year ago there was a orca in the Pacific Northwest pod, a mother who’d had a baby that died right after it was born and she went on a thousand mile mourning, funereal tour with the baby on her snout showing the baby because it was the first one that had been born in three years. Anyway, I found myself just tears streaming down my face thinking about this happening. I had already been working on a book about animal intelligences and a young woman who lives in Brooklyn where I live who develops a superpower to begin to speak with animals.

And so that’s the novel I am actually still working on and it’s a sort of hybrid fantasy mystery kind of thing. God knows if I can do it, who knows? But the research I do with all my books, I spend a massive amount of time trying to learn about animal intelligence and things. Anyway, there was this perfect intersection between my desire to… I’m not a scientist, I don’t have zillions of dollars to donate, but I wanted to create what I was calling wearable billboards in a way with my younger daughter who’s a graphic designer. I had two missions from this. One was to raise awareness and money, but also to only have a joyful experience with her.

We’re not trying to meet deadlines and scale and have distribution channels in every museum of natural history around the country. This is meant to be something that we do when either one of us has the time and bandwidth and where we share an experience of collaboration and joy. And I’m happy to say I believe so far we’ve really achieved it and we’re working on our fourth quarter products for this year and we’ve learned a lot in the creation of the ones that we did last year. And it’s been a delight. And so it’s this kind of reinforcing thing, which is everything I do also ends up being mission driven, about wanting to help people raise awareness and change their mindsets about things that we have these preconceived settled notions about.

And so that’s part of the work with eco consciousness and environmentalism and biodiversity. And that’s kind of, as I share with your sister, Margaret, who’s been helping me try and create the most bio-diverse environment that I can in my own little gardens, it’s all of a piece. And so I spend my time working on both those in two different day parts of my day.

Marion: Wow. Thank you for telling us about it and good luck with all your projects. I’m delighted to have you here and I’m delighted that your three books will be the three things that I continue to refer to during this COVID emergency. That’s Anne Kreamer, and you can find her books wherever books are sold. I’m Marion and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont, our assistant is Lorna Bailey, want more on the art and work of writing, visit it marionroach.com and take a class with me. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to Qwerty and listen to it wherever you go.