How and When to See Your Life As Story, with Bestselling Author Julie Metz

JULIE METZ IS THE AUTHOR I’ve long wanted to ask the question of how and when to see your life as story. How soon in an experience should we recognize that this might make a tale? How late? And when we realize it is a story, what are we to do next? Julie is the author of The New York Times bestseller, Perfection, and her new book, Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind, just out from Atria Books. She has written widely in places such as The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Dame, Salon, Redbook, Glamour, and Coastal Living. Her essays have appeared in numerous anthologies. Listen in and read along as we discuss when to recognize that something in your life is also a tale you might write.

Marion: I’m so glad to have you here. Welcome, Julie.

Julie: Thank you so much for having me. It’s really great to be here.

Marion: We met years ago during the wonderful run of your first book. It’s called Perfection, and it chronicles your evolution from when your husband dies in your arms leaving you with a six-year-old, and the discovery that the man you had been married to wasn’t who you thought he was, and with what insights you established life on your terms. My listeners are writers. And I’d love you to go back to that moment, if you would, when that series of remarkable life moments became something you saw as copy. When did you see that story as a book and not only as a formidable life challenge?

Julie: Well, actually in a way it was other people who took me there. I never thought that I would write about it because what was happening was so horrifying and appalling. One day a friend was sitting with me in my backyard and she said, “Julie, you should really write a book.” And I said, “No way, not happening.” And then strangely, about a week later, I was in a yoga class and a journalist approached me, a woman I seen around in town. I actually found her kind of intimidating. Anyway, she came up to me and she said, “Word on campuses, you’re writing a book.” And I said, “I don’t know where you heard that.” And she said, “No, you don’t understand, Julie.” She said, “This is a story that has to be written.” And then she said, “You’re going to have lunch with me. We’re going to discuss this.” So she invited me to lunch and we talked about it and she sent me home with advice, which was sit at my laptop or notebook for 20 minutes a day. Don’t sensor. Don’t edit. See what happens. And that’s how my writing career started.

Marion: It’s a wonderful story. And it has so much grace in it because the discovery that your husband had an other life that you didn’t know about could be a life stopping event. And yet the way you navigate out of it is a beautiful, remarkable tale. So, let’s talk about those 20 minutes when you first sat down. You make some notes. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But I’m thinking some of those might’ve been banged out in anger…

Julie: Yes.

Marion: …pounded with your elbows.

Julie: Yeah. I’ll say, it was a rant. I would sit down and rant is actually what it was. And there’s one section of the book that where one page remains from a 20-page rant. So, that’s about the ratio of ranting to final pages. Some of it happened with… It was journal entries. Some of it was actually emails because I had friends who were far away, who were very worried about me. And if I didn’t write to them everyday or so, I would get emails of concerns. So, what I started doing was writing one email and sending it everyday to sort of the four or five friends who were very far away. And that gave me a chance to start editing, that I would actually craft a letter and send it to those friends. And a lot of that ended up in the book.

Marion: Yes, it did. And I found that fascinating that you go there. And in journalism, we have an expression: you “go with what you’ve got.” And you had this material. You curated it, however. And that’s a huge piece. So the responsibility here was not only living through the experience of the discovery, recovery, mothering, and using your own insight and intuition to get you through to a much better place. But then to have to curate through those emails and that contact and that outreach and you curate expertly that I, that you use to choose what to tell us, I think creates a really reliable narrator. And I wondered in that progression from the death to the publication, when did the word “perfection” come to you? And how did that title shape or reshape that story for you? After all, practically, nobody thinks that their life is perfection. And it’s a really subtle and wonderful sort of skewing of the word that you use. So, when did that word come in and what role did it play in the story itself?

Julie: Well, before my husband died, he was actually working on a book and that book was on the subject of umami. It was a food book. And some people might know that umami is the Japanese word for the fifth taste that is sort of a, you’ve got your sour, sweet, salty, bitter, and then you have umami, which is sort of deliciousness. It’s the taste of ripe fruit or tasty cooked meat or lovely cheese. So, his book was going be called “The Umami Trail in Search of Perfection.” I think that’s what it was. And of course, I thought about that a lot after he died. And first, as part of a grieving experience, I was so sad that he had left a little bit of the writing behind and I was reading it. And then after everything else came out, the title felt quite ironic to me. And I decided to use it as you point out as a sort of a ironic gesture.

Marion: Beautifully done. Yeah. My listeners are writers. And meaning they’re wrestling with some aspect of the truth everyday. But that truth is — you know better than anyone — is a wild beast.

Julie: Indeed.

Marion: Yeah. We should get a… I’m thinking a t-shirt that says that. I don’t know.

Julie: Yes.

Marion: There is no one truth — or maybe there is. Maybe you chase after it forever only to discover there’s no one single truth. I don’t know. Everybody feels differently. But every time I sit down to write, I suspect I wrestle somehow with what I think about the truth, as well as the topic. And you’re the person I’ve been waiting to speak to about this. So, what are we in pursuit of when we sit down to write, is it the truth?

Julie: Well, as a memoirist, that is my goal. Of course, I want to tell the truth as I see it. And of course, I understand everyday that I’m working that is a very fuzzy business, because I’m just me and I’m a human and I have my perspective. I do feel that the sort of early phases of writing where you just kind of expel stuff from your head and get it onto paper is very important. But the editing phase is where you wrestle with some honesty, and really look at your motivation for sentences, and why you’re writing them, and what is the story that you’re telling, and how best to tell it. So, I think it’s ongoing and the project I’ve just started is fiction, but I’m seeing already that it’s the same. It’s the same problem because you have to inhabit your characters and they have to tell the truth as they see it. So you have to understand who they are, why they’re doing what they’re doing, why they’re saying the words they say, and feeling their feelings.

Marion: Yes. And finding those truths, finding those places to write to finding those feeling, their feelings can come to us in any number of ways, one of which of course is artifacts. And they exist in all of our lives as do the stories attached to them, the voices attached to them. We all know you can tell the history of the world on the head of a pin literally via the history of pins. Or, as the great writer Mark Kurlansky taught us so many years ago, in the crystals of salt or the nose of a cod fish. He goes into the world in these wild expeditions. You, in your new book, Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind, made a discovery amid your mother’s things. And it was something you found after her death. So please explain, because I just think this is an extraordinary beginning of a tale.

Julie: Well, my mother had told us a few stories about her early childhood, but actually very little. They were just a few story she would share and that was the limit. After she died, my father asked me and my sister-in-law to begin packing up my mom’s clothing. And I was going through a drawer and it was the drawer where she kept her nightgowns and slips. It was definitely the drawer she knew that nobody else was going to go into. And I started pulling out the clothing. And then the way back of the drawer, I found this book and it was a keepsake book. At the time, I didn’t know what it was. Later, I found that there are archives full of these books and it’s called a Poesie Album. It’s the equivalent of a child’s autograph book. They were wildly popular in Germany and Austria when my mom was a child.

And you would have your little school friends draw pictures, write little notes to you. A lot of the pages are filled with stickers that were very popular at that time. But of course at the time when I first found it, I pulled it out and I looked through it and I could tell that what this was an archive of her lost childhood. These were children that she’d gone to school with her teachers, older relatives. This book was maybe one of the few personal item she was able to bring with her from Vienna and she never saw any of those people again. And I understood in that moment that this book had been holding a lot of pain living in the back of a drawer. When I showed it to my father, he’d never seen it. And my parents were married for 54 years. So this book, she’d never even shown it to him. And that of course was a clue that there was something there that we didn’t know that was worth searching for.

Marion: And those moments of intuition that there’s something worth searching for can be a gift as well as a threat, I think. You go off in search of your mother’s lost childhood. You’re off doing research. And you find out in the time your family was fleeing Austria, there was what was called an American first movement going on characterized by anti-immigration fervor. And you’re on this real life mystery trail and at some point it occurs to you that there are terrible but compelling parallels between your family story then and the real moment experience of contemporary American polarization, where we’re othering one another. And this idea must drop into your head, this parallel.

And, as I said, it could be a gift or a threat, that many writers would stop right there. They’d say, “I can’t make this parallel. I mean, it’s way too much. It’s way too far a bridge to cross.” Instead, you do. And my question becomes, considering the audience, the writers here, what do you do next? To whom did you turn and test that material? Or, did you merely trust yourself? Or, did you have total confidence? Or, are you like me and just sheerly pigheaded about everything? Or, just what did you do when that inkling first comes on? You say, “I think these are really similar stories.” What did you do?

Julie: I would say that I am known in my family as very stubborn dog with a bone. So I am a searcher and I’m a bit relentless and I don’t give up. However, it did give me pause. I was helped in this situation because by then I was working very closely with a researcher archivist at the Leo Baeck Institute. And they were really my research partner. One person in particular there, Michael Simonson, was really my guide. And when I started to understand, especially after 2016, after the election, what was happening in this country and how some of the language paralleled in truly terrifying ways for me. The minute I heard a certain unmentionable person utter the words, America first, I just really was kind of appalled that we were back here again using the same type of language.

So a lot of my thoughts on this, I bounced off Michael. We would talk at length about this. And because I wanted to make sure that I was on firm research ground here and that I wasn’t just responding emotionally. But in fact, Michael would share with me a lot of documents from the time. I read a lot of newspapers in translation about American newspapers and then foreign articles in translation. And I saw that this is really the very way that people were looking at immigrants at the time is identical to now, even down to the same type of propaganda language.

Marion: So, you mentioned you need to be on firm ground. You mentioned that you’re a dog with a bone. You mentioned Michael’s a constant. The conversation is constant. So, you’re researching. When do we know we have enough? What’s the signal that the tale is in the bag as it were and we can write it or let it go? Or, when did you know that? Or, will you never know that?

Julie: That’s a funny question. I would say that what I discovered in writing this book is that I love doing research. I was so engaged by it. Sometimes I could feel myself going down rabbit holes and I thought I’ve got to pull myself back here or I’m never going to write any pages. So I can’t say that there was a day that I knew, now I’m done, but there was a day when I thought pages must get written and that has to start now. And then I thought, later if I realized that I need something more, I can always go back. This was of course an internal conversation I was having with myself all the time while I was working. “Stop researching, start writing.” Okay. We’ve hit a wall. We need more information. Stop writing, go back to researching. So, it was very much a give and take. Of course, deadlines are a wonderful thing. So once I had sold the project, then of course I had a due date. And that helped me sort of guide me that sometimes you’ve just got to stop and get work done.

Marion: Yeah. Pages must be written. I think we need to put that up on the wall too. That it’s just true. And nobody can say it better than that. So, one of the things that I find to be most compelling/confounding in writing memoir is the lens. Readers love to be provided a lens through which to read the tale. After all, we see the world through. We can see the world through any lens if you put it in front of us. And readers are grateful for that lens. It helps in the reading itself. Maybe in your introduction you say there’s no such thing as perfection. Or we suggest that in reclaiming your mother’s lost childhood, we discover America today. It just helps the reader. But I would argue that finding that right lens is far more difficult for memoir writers than for other non-fiction writers. Since we have to distance ourselves from our very own tales to recognize the universal, right? That universal, that reason why should I be reading this other person, the reader. So, can we talk about that? How do you write for the world when the material is all yours?

Julie: I think this idea that you’re bringing up is really the central conflict of memoir writing. All you have is the story that’s yours. And when you realize that there might be something for other people there as well, you’re always telling this very unique story that is your life. At the same time, while you’re telling that story, you have to step away. As you point out, you have to step away enough that you can look at the story and craft it with some kind of objectivity. So, I think it’s sort of a problem that is always there that you’re always grappling with. I think I’m grappling with it right down to the last day that I’m editing is always trying to balance that editor versus the authentic self that is telling a story. And of course at the same time, I’m trying to tell a story that will engage people to look at their own lives and a bit at the world around them and see the connections.

Marion: We do see the connections here. And it fascinated me to go from the micro to the macro. I’m looking on your website, I was really almost overcome by the generosity of you providing photographs of artifacts that you found along the way along with the Poesie book. Probably the most compelling one for me was this patented fan-shaped packaging manufactured by your grandfather that in no small part kept your family alive. And you went so far as to see the machine that continues running today to make this. But that micro, that’s beautiful. It does look like a fan and it’s for drug dispensing. That micro to the macro, that constant need for the writer to go from this piece, this artifact to the fact that this is why you’re here must have been… Well, tell us in your own words, when you found that artifact and how? What did you know you had when you saw it?

Julie: When I was growing up, my mother would try to describe this object for me. There were many objects that she did leave behind. For example, my grandfather’s camping utensils, which are another object of fascination for me in the story. But this paper fan, she would try to describe it. I had no visual. I had no idea what it was. It wasn’t until I made contact with somebody in Vienna who actually his runs a film company that occupies the former factory space. And I remember just describing it to him in an email. I said, “Oh, maybe you can help me. I’m looking for this thing. It’s made out of folded paper. It looks like a fan.” And somehow, for whatever reason, he had a read on it right away, perhaps because it is still used to dispense homeopathic medicine in Europe. And so, he may have actually seen this thing. Anyway, he hunted it down for me. And when I will say that after he found it, he mailed me one.

And when I opened up this envelope and I saw this thing, I will say it was one of the most profound, emotional experiences I’ve had as a writer and as a person. That was such a simple piece, it’s just folded paper, a little piece of sort of origami like thing. And then you look at it and all the stories that my mother had told me that this little piece of paper packaging had kept her father alive. It just really felt so important and beautiful. And I knew that the story of this object would be very important in the story. And I love that when a story hinges on something very small and ordinary. And so for me, that was really how it played out for me. It was when I saw the machine itself, that was also a very intense experience of understanding in a way the legacy of paper and ink and books and publishing in my own family and how really that had just been a thread that continued from one generation to another, starting with that little fan.

Marion: And this little fan, the Nazis couldn’t afford to kill the family because this was manufactured by them. This remarkable small thing keeps them alive. So why don’t you, in your words, can you tell us what the value of this paper was in their life?

Julie: So the paper fan when you unfold it, it reveals pouches. And in each pouch, the pharmacist could dispense powdered medicine. It was patented around 1905, but it was continually in use even in the 1920s and 1930s when pills were starting to be made. But by the time the war started, the pills would have been dispensed in metal packaging and metal was already being rationed. And so this little paper thing that had, it was maybe not as popular anymore, was suddenly quite valuable. The story my mother would say is that the business was taken away from him in 1938. All Jews had their businesses taken away from them and they hired a new… The new owner came in, but the new owner didn’t really understand how this thing was produced and didn’t know how to operate the machine. And the story my mom would always say is that this machine was so complicated that they had to keep her father around to run it.

And at the time I remember thinking, oh, how complicated could this machine be? — until I saw the machine. And the first thing I thought when I saw it was, wow, this is a one-off. It was made up of so many parts. And you could see that little bits of repairs had been done by hand. It’s a gorgeous one-off. And then, it all kind of made sense to me. And I thought, okay, I understand now. There are a lot of finicky machines in our lives. We’re not used to that anymore because so much of our lives is digital and we don’t see the mechanics of things in the same way. But this was a mechanical machine and it needed to run. So, there you are. That was the story.

Marion: It’s wonderful. It’s just so wonderful. So as we start to wrap this up, I have to ask you this. Both of your books are remarkably ambitious, recovering something after an enormous discovery. So, let’s talk about the real life thread of writing to exhaustion. I sometimes joke to my family that when I’m dying, I want no one standing over me saying anything apologetic or begging me to stay. I merely want them to be smiling saying, “God, you must be exhausted.” And it’s funny to say it, but I mean it. And it’s very real for writers. We do not necessarily get a lot of support for what we choose to write. So, how do you keep your ambition fed? How do you keep the exhaustion level from taking over? These were massively ambitious stories, both personally to live and professionally to write. So, what feeds that thing?

Julie: Well, the first book was exhausting and that I was having to untangle my own life during a very emotional time. This was a book that in a way when I look back on the process of writing it, it was really a process of grieving the loss of my mother and just reflecting on our relationship, which at times was very difficult. But just because a relationship is difficult, doesn’t mean you weren’t filled with regret and a desire that you could somehow change things when you can’t anymore. So, they were both very exhausting experiences. I feel very fortunate that I have a partner who is not a writer, but seems to understand that one needs nurturing as a writer and that it is very draining, that it can feel draining at times. So, that’s one thing that I have that I truly appreciate.

Also, my father was incredibly generous with his time. My father is 96. He’s a World War II veteran. He has an incredible memory and it’s very vivid still. With wonderful images, sometimes I just used his images because they were so wonderful. So, I felt very fortunate that way. At the risk of sounding very prescriptive, I would say that one thing my partner makes me do when he sees that I’ve been indoors a lot and sitting in front of the laptop and he makes me go out and get fresh air. And one thing I’ve done during the pandemic is actually I’m on sort of an exercise keg. And I will say that it’s been really helpful for mental, spiritual, physical health. And I appreciate that. And at the time I didn’t see how it was going to help what is really getting indoor, quiet, solitary pursuit, but engaging with the outdoors, pushing yourself physically is a very different thing than pushing yourself mentally. And I think there’s really a good connection there for the two. One helps the other.

Marion: Well, I’m glad for the prescription. And I hope you’ll keep doing it because I seriously, wonderfully, and open-heartedly look forward to your next piece of work, whatever it turns out to be. Thank you, Julie.

Julie: Thank you very much.

Marion: Thank you so much for coming along today. It’s a joy to talk to you.

Julie: Well, it was just great to be here.

Marion: The author is Julie, author of The New York Times bestseller, Perfection, and the brand new, Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind, just out from Atria Books. See all of her work at julie metz dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com and take a class with me on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go. And if you’d like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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