On the Consequences of Writing Our Tales, with Geraldine DeRuiter

GERALDINE DERUITER IS AN author and the creator of the blog, The Everywhereist. Her book, All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft, was published in 2017. Listen in and read along as we discuss the consequences of writing our tales.

Marion: Hi, Geraldine.

Geraldine: Hi, how are you?

Marion: I’m good. And this is just such a joy for me. I’ve been laughing with you, with you, for a good long time. I’ve also been holding my face and saying-

Geraldine: You can say you were laughing at me, it’s okay. You can say that.

Marion: I have to say many times, I was laughing at you. But mostly, I was laughing, I feel like I was afforded the opportunity to see the world through your eyes. So let’s talk about that. I mean you run The Everywhereist, a blog that you started in 2009, and along the way, you’ve garnered lots of awards for being a great website. And you got a book contract. And it’s pretty much every writer’s dream come true, your story. But let’s break it down a little bit for people because I’ve read, for instance, that what you originally intended when you started the blog is not at all what you’re writing right now, and it became a different beast. So let’s talk first about that early intent, when you sit down to write and you do it so publicly. What did you envision when you started the blog?

Geraldine: It’s been such a long journey now. Yeah, it was actually 2008 I think that I started. It was 13… No, please not 13 years, but yeah, it was 13 years now, which is terrifying. So I was in my twenties and I’m now 41. So let’s just put that terrifying perspective of my own mortality into place. But when I first started, I had just gotten laid off from my job and I was a copywriter and game content developer at a gaming company called Cranium, which you might have played before. It’s a game designed to make you fight with your friends. And so I worked there from my early mid-twenties into my late twenties. I got engaged while I was there. I met all these wonderful friends while I was there, people I’m still close to today. And then I went on vacation with a friend of mine and I received a text that we had all been laid off. So I was just a drift and I didn’t know what to do. And so I was freelancing and trying to figure out what to do next.

And my then fiancee and now husband was traveling a ton and he said, “You know what? Why don’t you come with me on some of these work trips? And we’ll figure it out. But why don’t you come with me? Because otherwise, we’re not going to see each other at all.” So I started traveling with him and it was just supposed to be for a few weeks, and then that turned into a few months. And all the while, I was doing freelancing. And this concept of being adrift while you are literally in this state of motion, it feels very poetic now. At the time, I had no idea what was going on with my life or my career. And he was the one who said, “Why don’t you start a blog?” Because this was 2008. Everyone had a blog, literally everyone. This was the time to do it. So I start this blog. And at first, it was, “Okay, well I’m going to be informative because I’m traveling a ton. So I should have an informative travel blog. That’s what it should be.”

And the thing is, all the other travel blogs out there were way better at it than I was, just schooling me left and right, right? We had the travel bloggers who could do the budget travel and the long-term hiking across intense areas, just anything, you name it. They were covering it in traveling with pets, traveling with children. And I was like — insert Muppet sound here — I did not know what I was doing. And so I tried to figure out what my differentiating factor was. What’s the thing that makes me me?

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: And this comes up a lot, doesn’t it? Right? Whenever you’re writing, whenever you’re doing anything, whenever you’re pitching.

Marion: Every time.

Geraldine: What’s your unique angle? What makes you special? So my big differentiating factor was really time. I’ve always been fortunate enough that I’ve had a lot of free time. My partner, my husband and I, we don’t have kids. He’s always been super supportive. He’s always really been a great guy to live with. And I actually told him this morning, I said, “I’m really glad that we share a life together.” And so I realized I can blog every day. It doesn’t have to be great, it doesn’t have to be long. But I can put a blog post up Monday to Friday. So that’s what I decided to do. And the other differentiating factor that I realized I had was I didn’t know what I was doing, which sounds ridiculous. But-

Marion: No.

Geraldine: If you think about it, everybody else was like, “I’m a professional. I can tell you this, that and the other.” And I’m like, “Yeah, you guys want to hear how I got scammed? You want to hear how I got lost? You want to hear how I spent $50 on a cab ride that should have cost me $4, because I’m about to tell you.” So I was one, a walking disaster and telling everyone about it, and two, I was there, right? People could rely on it. And at some point, you start to get stressed out and burned out because you’re churning it out and nobody’s there, right? You are playing to an empty concert hall day after day after day. And at some point, I remember I would wake up every morning and I would ask Rand, my partner, I would say, “What am I doing?” And he said, “Just keep writing.” And I said, “Yeah, but where’s it going?” And he said, “Just keep doing it.”

Marion: Oh, such good advice.

Geraldine: I know, right? Honestly, I hit the jackpot there. But-

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: Every morning whenever I thought that, I would just tell myself, “Okay, just keep writing.” So it was-

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: Almost two years to the day, I was literally thinking about giving up. I was looking at all these random job listings that I knew were going to make me miserable. And I got listed on Time Magazine‘s Top 25 Blogs of the Year for 2012.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: And suddenly, things started to shift. And now, people were reading my blog and that was a big turning point. And so I was like, “Okay, maybe there’s something here.” And so I kept doing it and I kept at it. And I think that’s one of the things is just sheer stubbornness for years and years and years. And here’s the funny thing about my career, every time I start to get burned out, something will happen that will drag me back in. I mean it’s literally just Michael Corleone. I think I’m out, and then… So I started to get discouraged and I had a situation where I had an indie publisher who wanted to publish my book, and then they disappeared on me. They folded.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: And I said, “Okay, I just need to take a break from this.” And so I published an article that was totally different than anything I had done. I published it for Marie Claire. And out of nowhere, this agent pinged me and she said, “Hey, I saw this piece and then I saw your blog post about how your last publisher folded and how you’re adrift right now.” So hey, there’s a funny upside to being transparent, which we can talk about in depth.

Marion: Yes.

Geraldine: But she and I met a couple of times and I met a few other agents, but nobody clicked the way that Zoe and I did. And she’s been Zoe Sandler with ICM, or I guess now ICM CAA if you’re following that.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: Yeah. She’s been my agent ever since. She did a fantastic job orchestrating an auction when my book sold. I’m sure you are familiar with that process obviously, but we can talk about that for your audience in further detail.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: And so it’s been this crazy wild ride and I recently just told her, “Hey, now I’m thinking about switching to fiction.”

Marion: Wow, we’ll get to that in a moment.

Geraldine: Yeah.

Marion: Yeah, that’s pretty exciting. You obviously didn’t get the memo that you’re supposed to stay in the one lane. I find that a lot in my interviews that nobody got that memo. So it sounds like you’re really comfortable. And if you were giving advice to a young writer, it would be let things reveal themselves. Just keep doing it. I tell people all the time, you’ve got to write all the time. It’s sheer volume, sheer tenacity and sheer stubbornness that is part of the thing. But along the way, you pick up some skills. So I don’t know if it’s a huge assumption that I’m making to say that you developed your voice along the way with this tenacity. When I look back, when I go back in the 164 pages on your blog, that’s a lot of blog posts.

But your voice has developed, changed. Maybe you always had this voice, direct, hilarious, honest, feminist, and not the least bit of afraid of a good scouring when a good scouring is needed. So my audience is writers and voice is perhaps the hardest tool to sharpen in the writer’s toolbox. So are you saying that your voice got sharpened with use? Or did you take some lessons? Did you read up? Talk about the development of the voice that you have? I could pick it out in a crowd at this point I think.

Geraldine: Oh, wow. Wow. Thank you.

Marion: You’re welcome.

Geraldine: Having anybody compliment your voice, or even just to acknowledge that it’s distinct is probably the most deep compliment I think a writer can get. I think you hit it the nail on the head when you said sharpening through use. I also do think that more structured learning can be beneficial, but I’ll be perfectly honest. Outside of school, I haven’t done any of that. But I have really spent a lot of time figuring it out and it just happened. And a lot of the way it happened was trial and error and seeing what worked and seeing what didn’t. And if you go back to the early pages of my blog, and I think there’s something like 1,500 blog posts, there’s well over 1,000, I know that.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: If you go to the early pages of the blog, it is such a bizarre thing to read. It is honestly… I don’t know who wrote those. I don’t know who that person is. I really don’t. She’s trying all this crazy stuff. And there’s one where it’s product reviews. What?

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: You’re reviewing lip balms. And then there was one where I tried to do comics, because that was big. Everybody was drawing comics back then.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: It’s just all over-

Marion: Saw that.

Geraldine: Yeah. And I keep it up there and part of the reason I keep those up there, they’re very dated, right? They don’t make any sense. But part of the reason I keep those up there is because they’re a great reminder, not just to me, but if anybody gets into the weeds, you see, “Oh, this doesn’t happen overnight.”

Marion: Right.

Geraldine: This reveals itself slowly and it reveals itself through trying everything, throwing it all on the wall and seeing what sticks.

Marion: Absolutely. And it’s such great advice. And literally I advise people to go to the blog and go back to those first pages and see, and watch how she did it. Watch how she evolved. Watch how the voice evolves. There’s so much to be learned along the way of writing and writing has consequences. Memoir writing in particular has consequences. And we’re going to get to a bunch of those I’ve noticed along the way in your work. And you’re the very definition of living out loud. Both you and your husband have blogs. You’ve written a book. You’ve shared your tale on many platforms. So let’s talk about this concept of living like this and its consequences. These days, I work as a memoir coach and memoir editor, but I’ve written and published and I’ve learned that I do not know how I feel about anything until I write it down.

And when I say that to my clients, sometimes they laugh nervously. I think they think they’re in the hands of a mad woman. But I say, “No, no, this is how we talk.” We say things like, “Oh my God, I went to this restaurant last night. You’ve got to go. It was so great. It was great,” meaning you learned nothing. But if I am forced to write it down, I’m forced to consider, to annotate, to reflect. And when I say, “I don’t know how I feel about anything until I write it down,” I include my beloved family members in that, and faith and the dog. And I can tell you, my husband’s great, but you don’t learn anything by that phrase.

Geraldine: Right.

Marion: I wonder if you too can just talk a little bit about learning how you feel while you write. I’d like people to actually trust me that this is true when I say it. So why don’t you back me up here, sister?

Geraldine: Wow. Yeah. And I think I might get a little bit emotional about this because this feels like it has very much a therapeutic component to it, doesn’t it? Yeah.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: So the thing that I always say is whenever I have an experience, and a lot of times, if it’s a traumatic or a bad one, I always say, “I’m upset about this, but I can’t really say why. And I’m going to need some time.” And the thing that I always tell people is I have a slow processing time with emotional stuff. And that could mean that it’s going to take me minutes or hour or years. And that’s about things that are good and things that are bad. I don’t really know how I feel until I get time to sit back and reflect on them.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: And a big way that I process things is exactly the same way I sit down and I write about it. And that was really true I will say of a lot of trips that I took. So much of my life was playing out on the road. My father lived in Germany for my entire life. We lived on two different continents. That’s a pretty intense experience for a kid to never actually share a roof with their parent, never share a home country with their parent. So traveling meant that I was changing my relationship with him because I was seeing him more and I was understanding him better. And so now, I had this blog where I was writing about my relationship with my father, which is something that I had never explored outside of this one to one relationship with him.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: People didn’t know about my dad, a handful of my friends had happened to meet him. But it really drew everything out and it forces you to put to words your feelings. And it’s a miraculous thing to do. And if we’re going to get into the weeds about it, this is something that psychotherapists tell you to do when you’re trying to process something. If you’re really angry at someone, what do you do? You’re supposed to write them a letter. You don’t have to send it, but you’re supposed to write them a letter. And I think it is the way in which, those of us who are inclined to write, it is how we can process things and how we can voice our emotions.

Marion: I agree completely. And you have a remarkable range of topic. I mean I don’t think that there’s a topic that you haven’t written about. I’ve seen you write from travel to writer’s block, to Mike Bloomberg’s meatball recipe, and the wild unbelievably fabulous love for your husband. But then there’s this other topic that you’ve taken on, which is your brain tumor. And I’ve got to assume that that taught you something new about the consequences of writing memoir. I’ve read some interviews, I’ve read the copy about it. It’s beautiful. It’s touching. But it’s also wildly generous. So when you took it there, your storytelling there, what other consequences do you think came to you as a writer and perhaps came to others as readers?

Geraldine: Wow. First of all, thank you. Second of all, again, this is one of those things that it’s strange to think about because it’s been almost a decade.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: So it used to be at the forefront, not to get too much into a pun, but it used to be at the forefront of my mind a little bit more.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: And now, it’s receded a bit. But when it first happened-

Marion: Good.

Geraldine: Well when we first… Yeah, it is. It is good. When it first happened or when I was first diagnosed with a brain tumor, which turned out to be non-cancerous.

Marion: Yes.

Geraldine: It’s a pilocytic astrocytoma. But I was having very bad migraines and we weren’t sure what was going on. So I got an MRI and they found a brain tumor in a pretty inconvenient location. Basically, put your finger right between your eyes and then imagine about three inches deep. So imagine the absolute base of your brain stretching across symmetrical.

Marion: Oh.

Geraldine: So yeah. So not a great spot. When I first found out, so much of my career comes back to my partner, which is real interesting. I think we’ve really influenced each other’s careers. I wasn’t going to say anything. I was like, “Man, I don’t really know how to process this.” And Rand said, “Well you could write about it.” And I was like, “Well yeah, but then what?” And he goes, “Well you’re going to put it on the blog, right?” And I said, “Well no, Rand, it’s a travel blog.” And he said, “No, it’s your blog.”

Marion: There we go.

Geraldine: Yeah. So everything shifted in that moment. That post, that time was where everything started to shift.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: And-

Marion: I thought so.

Geraldine: Yeah. That was really a turning point. And part of the reason that I wrote those posts, so it is 2012 and I am scouring the internet looking for information, just on anything about what is it like to have a brain tumor? What does it mean? And the only thing you find is stuff from WebMD that says that you have a lifespan of four weeks, which is super cool. So yeah, it was awful. I did find one blog and it was run by someone who I later became friends with, and he has since passed away. But his name was Chad Peacock. And we became really good friends actually through his blog. And his was the only resource out there really. But what I decided was that I was going to write the blog posts that I wished that I had found for myself.

Marion: There you go. Yeah.

Geraldine: Yeah.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: And it sounds really cheesy, but sometimes you have to be… I told my husband’s in search. And well he was in search, he’d get really mad if I said any of that, but he was in the search industry. He’s now more broadly in the marketing industry. But I always said, you have to be the search results that you want to find. And so I wanted people-

Marion: It’s such good advice.

Geraldine: Yeah. I wanted people to be able to find blog posts when they searched for brain tumor and brain surgery and what’s it like. I wanted them to find something besides this cold, sterile WebMD information that was not helpful at all. So I started writing everything about it.

Marion: Good.

Geraldine: It was a hard time. And it was really hard to write. It was hard to write physically. I couldn’t really stay awake. I could not get my brain to work. Fun fact, when they go in there, yeah, that’s not a good time. Not easy.

Marion: No, no, no.

Geraldine: So that’s when things started to shift.

Marion: Yeah. That’s what it felt like reading back through the bulk of your work is that it really did feel like a shift. And I’m so glad for you talking about the support of your husband, the support of when he was your partner, when he was your fiance, there’s support all along the way here. Having someone else who says, “Just write,” having someone else who says, “Write that,” having somebody who says, “Well that’s fine that you don’t know, but write it,” is essential. If you can’t get that at home, you need to get it in a writing coach or somebody, an editor that you trust. And what you also got was a lot of feedback. I read in an interview with you that you make the argument that our stories do not belong to only us and that once you share your story, others share theirs. And that’s what I also saw in your work.

People came forward with their own stories. And it’s a remarkable thing. This is a consequence of writing. And what I say to people all the time is you have to learn how to react. You’ve got to react to the things that happen to you, but artists react. That’s what we do. Either to the things that happen to us or to the what’s going on in the world. And it’s one of the real, I think, differentiators of your voice. You’re very reactive. You have hilarity. You have righteous indignation. You’ve got an awful lot of emotion in there. But let’s talk about that idea of reacting. I teach a course in how to write an op-ed and I teach people to react. You have a very famous thing that happened to you when you wrote a piece after Mario Batali, the disgraced foodie, offered up an online apology and included a recipe for it. You reacted and you reacted in a way that is…

I’m going to put a link in the transcript to your post about that. The way you reacted is real statement about #MeToo, is a real statement about what women endure, is a real statement about those damn cinnamon rolls that he had, the questionable logic of including in an online apology. But you reacted. So talk about reacting. It’s got to begin with some permission or confidence, or what?

Geraldine: Oh, boy. Wow. What a question. I am trying to think of how to even begin to approach this, but I will say a couple of things and you’ll forgive me. But we’re getting very deep into my own psychology here, which is that I come from a very big boisterous Italian family. And I was the first girl born to my generation.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: So there were seven male grandchildren before me.

Marion: Ooh.

Geraldine: And then there was me. Now, that is its own very interesting essay that I will one day write.

Marion: I hope so.

Geraldine: But yeah. And the joke that I always say is basically everything was fine and then boom, she’s a girl. And they were like, “Oh no, oh no. Now, there’s a problem.”

Marion: Yeah. Yeah.

Geraldine: So there was already so much chaos in my family that I think the socialization around me and what I was taught was, “You’re crazy.”

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: “And you’re about to fly off the handle,” because I was responding to an insane… My family is off the charts nuts. I love them. I love them dearly. So that would be the joke that we always say. And actually, my husband does this. And it’s our private joke is we’ll be in the family and somebody will ask an open ended question or there will be a problem, and I will offer a solution and no one will hear it. And I’ll say it a few more times and no one will hear it. And then Rand will go, “Hey, I have an idea,” and he will literally repeat what I just said while making unblinking eye contact with me.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: And everyone will go, “Oh my gosh, Rand. That was such a great idea.” And I will just flip him off.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: And so that is our dynamic. So there is this idea that I actually couldn’t react in the family because anytime I did, they would say, “You have too much of a temper. You are just flying off the handle.”

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: Let’s put that in its own pocket, right? And then pocket two is I think that that is something that a lot of women experience.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: Right? And it’s that you are not allowed to react to things. And in a corollary way, I think men are taught that they’re not allowed to react to things in ways that reveal emotion or vulnerability.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: So we’re all trained to have specific reactions or no reactions at all. And so I think it very much is a form of rebellion.

Marion: The writing, yeah.

Geraldine: To write and to react.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: And it is I think a terrifying act. And I think it’s something that is remarkably difficult to do even now to overcome and to get to that point. But the one thing that has made it a lot easier is the idea of I’m not the only one seeing this, right?

Marion: Right.

Geraldine: And that’s what I always tell myself when I’m trying to formulate or trying to come up with a reaction to something, that’s the first thing that goes through my mind.

Marion: I love that.

Geraldine: And the Mario Batali blog post, when I wrote that, I was looking around and I was like, “I’m not the only one seeing this, right?” And sometimes you just need to be the first person to be like, “Hey. Hey, you guys, this is messed up.”

Marion: Right.

Geraldine: And then everyone’s like, “Okay, thank you. I thought so too.”

Marion: Yeah. Yeah. Well you had a million hits on that blog post, right? I mean it’s extraordinary and wonderful and appropriate, and all that.

Geraldine: Oh, no, that was crazy. Oh, no. It was five million visits to the blog in a week.

Marion: Oh, it’s more than I realized. Oh, good.

Geraldine: Oh, it was crazy. It was unrelated, but I got a sectional front page op-ed in The Washington Post.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: I had so many people, editors from just a bunch of publications contacting me to write for them.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: And I won a James Beard award.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: For journalism.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: For that piece.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: So it was a life changer definitely. That was a career highlight. And it was funny because so two things, I, one, almost didn’t write that piece. And the reason I almost didn’t write it is I had been on the road and I thought that the timeframe… Too much time had elapsed, because he put that newsletter out in December, mid-December.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: And I wrote that blog post in early January.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: And I just thought that the two weeks that had passed were too fast, too much time had passed.

Marion: Yeah. Too long. Yeah. Uh-huh.

Geraldine: And that was part of the reason why it ended up on my site and no one else’s was that I thought it was too late to pitch it anywhere.

Marion: Yeah. Fascinating.

Geraldine: So I made the cinnamon rolls and I had been thinking about writing the post in my head for two days, but I probably sat down, and this is terrible to admit, I probably wrote that blog post in about 45 minutes.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, it reads like it’s on fire, that’s for sure. It’s a great lesson in reacting and the good that came of it. I’m fascinated that it was on your blog. In other words, people should not be afraid to publish where they can. And it gives a great lesson there. So let’s talk about the book because in 2017, you published a wonderful book called All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft. And in the publishing trade, this is sometimes called a blog to book conversion. You mentioned in the beginning you had an indie publisher fall through, and then you got a call from this agent, which is a wonderful thing to happen and exactly what we want to have happened, especially with this knowledge in our minds now that sometimes you put things on the blog and you don’t go pitch them elsewhere because you think too much time is elapsed. And yet, from that you win a James Beard, from that you get offers from everybody. So when you make this conversion to writing with a publisher, it can be a bit shocking, especially for bloggers because suddenly-

Geraldine: Yeah.

Marion: You’ve got somebody’s arm looped over your shoulders and it’s called a business, a publisher, and it comes with an editor. So I know we haven’t talked about this yet. I want to know what it was like and what people should expect when they’ve got an editor who’s overseeing. You’ve got a very generous piece on your website where you publish a deleted chapter from your book and you talk a lot about learning to, “Kill your darlings or murder your darlings,” as Arthur Quiller-Couch said. But what else, as we start to wrap this up, can you tell us about the experience of working with another human being after being pretty much on your own for so long as a published writer?

Geraldine: There is that little bit of moment of shock about it. I will say that I do have a journalism background.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: It’s 20 years ago now, but it was not totally foreign for me to work with editors. And because I’ve done a lot of copywriting, I’ve always had people, senior editors, senior copy editors. So I was used to my voice not being the final pass.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: And so actually adjusting to the blog, that was the big adjustment. So this shift back wasn’t as strange as it might be for other people. But it definitely is very unusual. I will say there’s a lot of joy in it. And I would tell people that they need to see that because so much of the time when you are writing a blog, everything in a blog is a first draft, everything, right?

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Geraldine: And so you never get it to that next level because you never get another pair of eyes on it. So working with that other person is just this wonderful opportunity to get it to be better. And you have to be open to that idea that they are working with you and it is not an oppositional relationship, it is a partnership.

Marion: I love that. I love that. I had the four finest editors I know in New York on my books and they taught me how to write books, and they always made my copy better.

Geraldine: Yeah.

Marion: They always made my copy better. And I say that to people-

Geraldine: Absolutely.

Marion: Learn, relax, don’t be defensive. So I will definitely link that space on your blog where you show us so kindly the deleted chapter and you speak so lovingly of the editing process. You even run a couple of the email exchanges between you and your editor about falling in love with lines and having the editor say, “No.”

Geraldine: Colleen Lawrie, at Public Affairs, which is under the Hachette umbrella, was my editor. And she was just great. She was great. She was really good at being really forthright. And there were a couple of times she said thanks to me like, “Hey, look, I think that this was more fun to write than it is for someone to read.” And it’s just about being like, “Okay.”

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: “That’s good to know, we’re on the same page. Our goal is to make a good book.”

Marion: Right.

Geraldine: “You’re not trying to make a bad book.”

Marion: Right.

Geraldine: So we’re just both trying to get there. But I think it was also there were moments when I needed to know when to push back. And so my issue was actually too much differential. I think Colleen will probably disagree. But my feeling is always if someone comes and tells me something, because my inner critic is so strong, if they come in and they’re like, “You should change this,” I go, “Oh, yeah. No, you’re right. You’re right. That’s way better. I’ll change that right away. Is there anything else that I should do? Do you want me to cut my hair? That’s a good idea.”

Marion: Yeah. “How about makeup, got any makeup tips?”

Geraldine: I’ll do that.

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: Yeah. Yeah. “Do you think I should switch to overalls? I can wear overalls every day. I think I’d look good in overalls. No overalls, okay.” So it’s that dynamic right, where I was like… And so I scaled back so much. And then there were a couple times where I was like, “Oh no, no, no, no, no. The pendulum has swung too far over.” And I actually had to put on the breaks and come back and be like, “Oh no, I can fight you on some stuff.” And I remember there was some joke. It’s the end of a chapter with my brother in the book. It’s about how my brother was an aspiring actor in LA and he’s now switched to… He primarily does screenwriting and more behind the scenes stuff. But I mentioned, my brother looks remarkably like Zach Braff. And that I talk about my relationship with my brother and how he torments me. And the end of the chapter is about how there will always be this role in my life for this vulnerable villain and this antagonist who I love so much.

And it’s the role that my brother was born to play. And the last line of the chapter is I’d cast Zach Braff in the part. And it flows a bit more poetically in the book obviously. But Colleen wanted to cut that last line about casting Zach Braff in the part of my brother in the movie of my life. And I was like, “No.” I was like, “No, I need that one line,” because it anchors our entire relationship. And it’s that last like, “Oh, she’s ended it so beautifully. No, she didn’t. She got a dig at her brother at the end because they are actually siblings.”

Marion: Yeah.

Geraldine: And so, it was learning when do you fight back?

Marion: Yes.

Geraldine: And so I think it is very much a dance and figuring out that balance and that back and forth.

Marion: Yes, it is. Well that’s wonderful and helpful. And I think we’ll have to wrap it up. But thank you so much for the generosity of this interview. I’m so grateful and I wish you all the best. I can’t wait to see what you do next. I’ve become a big fan girl here. So you can hear me cheering from upstate New York. So thank you, Geraldine. It’s been a joy.

Geraldine: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been absolutely delightful.

Marion: The writer is Geraldine DeRuiter. You can see more from her at her site, The Everywhereist online at everywhereist 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 Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach 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 like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.