WHEN KERRI MAHER SET out to write a book about writing, she was following the great dictum to write the book you want to read. She followed that with more books, and quickly became a USA Today bestselling author of The Paris Bookseller, The Girl in White Gloves and The Kennedy Debutante, and has just released her new novel, All You Have to Do is Call, a timely story based on the real lives of women who fought for a woman’s right to choose. Listen in as we discuss how to write the book you want to read, and so much more.
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Marion: It’s an honor to have you here, Kerri, welcome.
Kerri: Thank you so much for having me, Marion. I’m excited to talk to you today.
Marion: Well, I’m excited to talk to you and you say in your online bio that at 15 you were “editing my high school newspaper writing short stories for speech and dreaming of publishing a novel in the not too distant future.” And while you certainly get to that novel writing ambition, publishing novels in 2018, 2020, 2022, and now 2023. You made a significant beginning with a writing memoir in the tradition of Anne Lamott’s, Bird by Bird.
It’s a book for young adult writers called, This is Not a Writing Manual: Notes for the Young Writer in the Real World. I’ve read that you wrote it because you wished you had it to read when you started out. So, let’s talk about that. That adages to write the book you want to read. My audience is writers and they truly want to follow that advice. So can you talk about that decision please, and how you empowered yourself to do so?
Kerri: This is a great question and I have a funny little meme to share in case people haven’t seen it on Instagram. It was going around a few months ago that says, “They say write the book that you want to read because you’re going to have to read it 75,000 times in the editing process.” Which turned out to be really, really true.
But more seriously, the reason I wrote This is Not a Writing Manual is truly because it’s the book I wish someone had been able to hand me when I was in high school living in Stockton, California, not a huge population of writers where I grew up. Getting kind of random advice about where to go and how to do that, and I just didn’t know what I was doing. And I also really was not prepared for how long it was going to take.
So I wrote that novel, I’m sorry, I wrote that book. It’s a nonfiction book when I was in my late thirties and I still hadn’t gotten a book deal yet. I had had some real rewards in the writing life along the way. I had gotten into graduate school to get a Master’s of Fine Arts in Fiction writing. I had gone to a few writers conferences. I had gotten a couple of short stories published, but I hadn’t gotten the big yes for a novel.
And at that point in my career, I had written four novels, four fully completed novels that had not sold. And I had an agent that had tried to sell them. Well, actually the first two novels never got an agent, but my agent tried to sell my third and fourth without any success. And I really had to look around for reasons to continue writing. Why was I still doing this thing?
And so the book kind of emerged for me as a way of exploring why the writing life was worth living. I say this in my introduction that I really… It’s like the book is you, the reader and me, and writing therapy together so we can talk about why the writer’s life is worth living.
Marion: I love that, and I love the book and I love the audience for the book because the training for writing begins with reading. And so we are really training as writers from a very young age. And while lots of the people with whom I work haven’t had a chance to start writing until much later in life, I think that you really shoot for the right demographic with that book and saying, “Listen, if this is what you want to do…”
And it’s open to anyone. I mean, I read it as an adult, but it’s open to anyone. So talk a little bit more about the idea of training. I think one of the things that people don’t understand is that there’s a lot of training that goes into writing. You talked about getting rejected. Is that a big part of the training do you think?
Kerri: It is a big part of the training because even after you get published, you still get rejections. Honestly, it never ends. There is a lot more no in this life than there is yes, which makes the yesses all the more precious really. It really helps us, I think, savor them and really enjoy them and understand how meaningful they really and truly are.
When I finally got that first short story accepted at a literary journal, I was just beside myself with joy, right? There was nothing better. So I think that’s part of the training, right, is learning to withstand the nos. But also, and this is really important, and I hope I’m not jumping the gun out of question.
Marion: No, no, go ahead.
Kerri: But part of the training also is meeting other writers and forming a community around yourself because while you’re withstanding all those nos, you need your friends who really understand what it’s like to get that thousandth no. So they can pick you up off the ground, dust you off, and set you back on the path. We really, really, really need our cheerleaders. And we need people who are with us on the road.
Some people who are ahead of us, some people who are walking with us, some people who are behind us. And I found that to be really important. And that’s another reason why I wrote the book, right, was so that I could find a larger community in the world of writing. And actually, it’s funny that we’re talking about this because I recently started a Substack.
And I am taking, this is not a writing manual, and responding to my 10 years ago writer self from now the perspective of having published a few novels.
Marion: This is your Substack, Sandcastles. Yes?
Kerri: Yes.
Marion: I recommend it to everybody.
Kerri: Thank you.
Marion: I think it’s a wonderful device to have this conversation. Absolutely. And I love the idea of community. You’re absolutely right. I remember when I didn’t have it, and then I remember the difference in my life as I started to meet other writers and I started to have the feeling that I also had to get out in the world more.
And every play, every movie, every cocktail party becomes something from which you learn something about the transactions between people and you pay attention differently when you have the encouragement that you are a writer. And that encouragement frequently comes from that community. So I think it changes one’s lens with which they look at the world if you have community.
And I think that your book really sets people up to understand that. So as someone who’s always in the world of writing, I thank you for that book. I think it was a great contribution to the world.
Kerri: Thank you so much. That means a lot to me.
Marion: Well, you’re welcome. And so as I mentioned earlier, in terms of just the schedule, the years in which you’ve published. You have a truly formidable publishing schedule here, publishing books in 2013, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023, making you the perfect person to ask about discipline. When I’m on panels, I’m always the bummer writer because everyone else is talking when they talk about inspiration, they’re talking about getting in touch with their angels, feather on the right side of their brain or whatever.
And I just go, “Uh-huh, nope. It’s all about discipline.” I believe in discipline, but maybe you don’t, maybe you are getting in touch with your right side of your brain using your angel’s feather. So where are you on the discipline spectrum and what can you give us in terms of a sense of your writing routine, please?
Kerri: I love this feather business. I’m going to have to go get myself a feather and tickle myself at my desk. I’m a disciplinarian. It’s actually a little bit of both for me. Let’s start with the discipline. I think I absolutely would not have books without my ability to sit down and write even when I’m not inspired.
Marion: There you go.
Kerri: Most days I sit down even without a deadline. I mean, now I’m in the luxurious position of having a deadline hanging over my head, which acts as a kind of outside inspiration, if you will. But there were many, many years and five unpublished novels that I wrote without deadlines. I had to make myself do it. I had to sit down, I’m going to say every day. It’s not actually every single day, most days, when I had a particular chunk of time to write the book.
So what this looked like when I was writing The Kennedy Debutante, which did sell. My daughter was three years old and in nursery school three mornings a week. So I was like, that’s the time I have. I’ve got three mornings a week. So I drop her off at nine in the morning. I come home, I make myself that second cup of coffee, and I sit down at my desk and I’m like, “I have two and a half hours to work on this book.”
And that is what I did. I did nothing else with those two and a half hours, three times a week but write that book. Because that made me focus in a way that maybe I might not have focused if I had had more time. The time pressure actually created an environment in which I had to focus and I had to write. And I was like, “Kerri, you’re going to write these thousand words whether they’re good or not.”
And what I have found now over the course of several books that I write this way. My daughter is now 13 years old and she’s in school for a longer portion of the day, but I still really write in two to three hour chunks. It just works for me. It’s a good amount of time to really focus on the book. And what I’ve learned is that when I go back to revise the book, I cannot tell which days and pages I was “inspired on” or which ones were the days that felt like just laying track.
I was just like, “Oh my God, I just have to get these words out so that I can call it a day.” There are more days like that than not. And like I said, you can’t really tell. Now, this is where I’m going to get a little funky with the feather and the muse.
Marion: That’s fine. Go right ahead.
Kerri: There is an element of that to it. I think that what keeps me going back to my desk is the idea that I really believe in the book, and I really love the book. I really love the characters, and they keep pulling me back to it. And I actually, this summer, speaking of books about writing and creativity, I did The Artist’s Way this summer by Julia Cameron. I used to scoff at this idea that I would need such a guide to the world of creativity.
If you had told me 10 years ago that I would need The Artist’s Way after four novels, I would’ve been like, why would I need The Artist’s Way? But then you look at the back of The Artist’s Way, and there’s Elizabeth Gilbert saying, “I’ve done The Artist’s Way three times in my career.” And I’m like, well, if Elizabeth Gilbert can do it three times, I can do it once.
And so I was at a point in my writing life where I really needed to get in closer touch with my muse and with my kind of creative side. And I think there are different points in our career when we need to get more in touch with the sort of soft, the rebel in us that doesn’t want to sit down and have the discipline to write. And I found it to be really useful.
Marion: That’s fascinating. And the rebel. Well, rebel is something that I think you have some real authority on. And because the books you’ve published just fascinate me, the topics, the center of them, The Kennedy Debutante, which you just referenced, published in 2018 has as its center, Kathleen known as Kick Kennedy. A dynamic, flamboyant and ultimately tragic member of the same Kennedy clan that included John and Bobby and another brother Joe who was killed in action in World War II.
The Girl in White Gloves takes on the life we don’t know about Grace Kelly. The Paris Bookseller published in 2022, brings back to life one of my favorite people in history, the great Sylvia Beach, American-born bookseller and publisher who owned and ran Shakespeare and Company in Paris and bravely published James Joyce’s, Ulysses when no one else would.
And this new book, All You Have to Do Is Call, covers women of the Jane Collective or Jane, officially known as the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation. An underground service in Chicago that operated from 1969 to 1973. All of these feature American women who, what? What would you define as your through line here in your interest in these women in your work to date?
Kerri: Well, the first three part of what defined them was they were American women who went to Europe and did amazing things, which was really nice for my vacations. My research vacations.
Marion: An honest writer, there we go.
Kerri: It really was not on purpose. It was just sort of a happy accident. So then we come to this fourth novel, there’s no trip to Europe in store, but I did get to go to Chicago, and I had never been to Chicago. And I really enjoyed Chicago.
Marion: It’s a great city.
Kerri: It’s a great city. Jokes aside, I do think that what unites all four books is that they are about women who define themselves against a particular set of historical odds. So, we have Kathleen Kennedy who is really defining herself against the social mores of the time, which were the 1930s and forties. She falls in love with… She’s a Catholic, obviously, she’s a Kennedy. She falls in love with a Protestant, and this is not allowed. And so she has to make a meaningful choice about who she’s going to be. I used to say that my guiding question for that book is why did she marry the guy? And so that was that. Grace Kelly, actually, my guiding question was the same. Why did she marry the prince? What was that choice about for her? And again, here is Grace Kelly.
She comes from enormous privilege in Philadelphia. She tries actually to become a stage actress and is never successful as a stage actress, but Hollywood loves her. And so she reluctantly goes to Hollywood. This was so interesting to me and really reminded me as myself as a young artist living in New York. So I really connected with her on that level. Again, so much no in Grace Kelly’s life.
She was going out for auditions, constantly being turned away for the roles that she really wanted. And then she’s discovered and Alfred Hitchcock puts her in three phenomenal movies, and there she is. But again, why does she make the choice to leave that life and become a princess? So again, an independent woman making interesting choices at a complicated time in American history.
And then Sylvia Beach, I think is the most obvious rebel of those three. She’s a lesbian, she’s an entrepreneur. She never gets married. She finds herself. I did not have the question, why did she marry that guy? But why did she open the bookstore? And why did she choose to publish James Joyce’s novel Ulysses after it became a banned book?
There’s no simple answer, but again, we have this woman who is making choices that are entirely unique and special to her. And she’s not taking into consideration what people are going to think about her or how she’s going to be remembered. She’s following her heart, she’s following her intuition. She’s following her own heart and mind. And now we have, All You Have to Do Is Call.
And I think it’s important to point out that unlike those first three books, which are about real life women. All You Have to Do Is Call, all the characters are entirely fictional. There’s no one in this book that is based on a real person. So that’s a real departure from my first three in that way. And also there are three narrators of All You Have to Do Is Call. We have Veronica, who’s one of the founders of my imaginary Jane.
We have a very good old friend of hers named Patty, and we have Margaret, who is a young professor at the University of Chicago, who is sort of beginning her life as a young career woman, who starts volunteering for Jane. So they’re fictional, but there’s three of them, and their narratives get braided together.
Marion: So with Veronica and Patty and Margaret, are you freed up then because they’re fictional? We have the Jane Collective, which has absolutely been documented. I mean, you can look it up, it’s on Wikipedia for goodness’ sake, but do those women allow for you a little more elbow room?
I mean, what is it about the fictional women after writing from biographical details that you embroidered in the previous three books? What is it about the fictional women that allowed for a different kind of experience for you?
Kerri: It absolutely was. We might use the word liberating as in women’s lib. This period that I’m writing about, but it also often felt like I was hanging on by fingernails from a building that had no scaffolding on it.
Marion: I wondered.
Kerri: So listen, I’ve alluded to these five novels that I wrote before, The Kennedy Debutante that were never published. Those were also books about entirely fictional characters. Those were not biographical novels at all. So there was a little bit of a psychological hump that I had to get over with All You Have to Do Is Call.
I had this more than a few moments of being like to myself, “Well, Kerri, those first five books didn’t work out for you so well. Are you supposed to be writing about fictional characters?”
Marion: That’s so generous of you to tell us that. I really appreciate that. Thank you.
Kerri: I think we have to talk about our deepest fears. I mean, that’s what the community is all about. So also, in all honesty, it took me a while to get to know these characters. I went through many drafts and some exercises with this book that I have never gone through before. At one point, my editor said to me, “You know Kerri, with your first three books that we worked on together.” I’ve been lucky enough to have the same editor for all four books.
She said, “You read all this material like biographies and histories about these women before you started writing about them. So that was your way of getting to know them. Maybe with these characters, you should write a little biography of them to help you get to know them better.” And at first, I was like, I don’t know. Do I really need to do that? And then I did do it, and boy was she right. And I actually assigned this to my students now.
It really was really helpful for me to write these characters’ backstories. It only took a few pages for each of the main characters, but I even wound up doing it for some of this important secondary characters too, including the husbands. Because it really did help me get to know them and understand what made them tick and understand how they were really connected in the past so that I could pull those threads through in the course of writing the novel.
Marion: That’s a great answer. In my twenties, I was a screenwriter, and we were trained, I mean, it was drummed into me by really great screenwriters that you write an entire biography for every single character. That you know where she went to college, what she did in college, what she majored in, whether she wore the signet ring to her all women’s college on her pinky finger, or if she wore it on her middle finger, if you know what I’m saying.
So there was no end to what you had to know because you had to communicate all of that in a word phrase or gesture in a screenplay. You don’t have that background, that B matter, that backstory that you get to put in novels. You just had to go with what you’ve got right there in the moment. And so I love that. That’s so generous. And a lot of people are going to be nodding their heads going, “Oh.”
Because I work with memoir writers, and you really do know your characters, but you’ve got to pull from what you know to give us that pinky ring. And that’s going to mean a lot, right? It’s got to mean more than a piece of jewelry. So that’s great. I love that. And I love that your editor suggested it and that you took her up on that. That’s great. That’s wonderful. So let’s just follow up on that a little bit about research.
Speak to me about your research to writing ratio and how long you research. I mean, some people say, I give it six months of research and then I write for 12 months or whatever. But you’re doing it before and during writing, of course, you have to go back and check stuff. And also what happens along the way when there inevitably are surprises when you really get to know a topic.
Kerri: So this book required less research overall than The Paris Bookseller did or than The Kennedy Debutante. The Kennedy Debutante was my first go at historical fiction. So I really read a lot. And truly, I love the research part. I love the learning about the subject as much as I like writing about the subject. So it’s really a pleasure for me to do the research and the reading.
And in the case of this book, actually, I watched a number of documentaries that were super helpful to me as well. I can’t give you a great amount of time for books that are not biographical. I probably spend three-ish intensive months researching, get my bearings, and then I started writing. And with all of the books, what I will do if I bump into a scene where I don’t have the information I need.
What I usually do is I leave a fill in the blank. I’m like, fill this in later. If I’m in the mood, if I’m really ahead on my word count or something, or it’s not going very well. Sometimes I’ll do the research in the moment, which usually involves Googling the thing first. And you’d be amazed what you can find from very reliable, excellent sources just on the internet at the tips of our fingers.
And sometimes I let myself go down those rabbit holes. And sometimes, like I said, I fill in the blanks and I come back to it later. A lot of those blanks are very small. What would they’ve been listening to on the radio in this moment? Or what movie might Gabe and Margaret have gone to see on their second date? Those kinds of things. Sometimes I’m just really in the scene. I don’t want to stop to look that kind of stuff up, but I’ll look it up later.
Marion: Great. I love that. And it is research, and some of it’s on our fingertips. Some of it takes that huge rabbit hole and I too love research. I probably could just do that forever, but at some point you got to start typing. So let’s just talk about this idea of at some point. I work with writers all day, every day as a memoir coach and editor. And I have a few pat phrases that I bring to the work.
One of which is writers react, meaning you got to be reading the news, you must know what’s in the air. And then you react, whether it be in an op-ed, an essay, a book length work. So in June of 2022, the Dobbs decision was handed down that overturned Roe v. Wade. And we knew for a good long time that this was coming, like 50 years. But when along the timeline of anticipation of this seismic decision, did you start to work on this book?
Kerri: I love that writers react. That’s really terrific. And in fact, that’s exactly how this book came about, right? So it was actually, I’m going to take you back to 2018, months before The Kennedy Debutante has come out. It’s sold, it’s in the pipeline. I’ve got a cover. It’s coming out. But I’m driving to meet a friend for a movie, and I’m listening to NPR and they do one of their terrific narrative news stories about the women of Jane.
And I’m listening to this news story about these college and just post-college age women in Chicago who learned to give safe, inexpensive abortions and gave 10,000 of them over a period of just a few years. And I’m like, “What? They did what?” And they were women like me with no special medical training. So I was just absolutely floored by their bravery and their call to service and just the incredible work that they had done.
And this is a show for writers, so everyone will understand that when I parked the car, I immediately fired up Amazon to see if anyone had written about them yet in novel form. And it didn’t look like anybody had. So I just knew in that moment that I had to write about them and that I desperately wanted to write about them. But it was a journey from that moment even then. So at that point, the Kennedy Debutante is kind of in the pipeline.
I’m writing the Grace Kelly novel. The first time my agent pitches what we were calling the Jane Novel to my publisher, she pitches it alongside The Paris Bookseller. And my publisher’s like, “Oh, The Paris Bookseller is the clear next book for Kerri. Go write that book. We’re not sure about Jane. Let’s talk about that later.” And so I happily went and wrote The Paris Bookseller, and then we circled back around to the Jane novel in late 2020, and that’s when I got the green light to start writing the Jane book.
So I really started researching and writing Jane in earnest at the end of 2020. So when Dobbs happens in the summer of 2022, I’m pretty far along in my process. I am really in a revision stage at that point. But there is time for me to make some adjustments and fine tune the book. And at that point, that’s when I make a choice to lean into certain legal aspects of the history that I had in the draft but I wasn’t hitting those notes quite as hard.
So for instance, the Comprehensive Childcare Development Act that was on the books in 1970, which would have provided universal childcare and preschool to American families, passed the House and the Senate. We were this close. I hope everyone’s sitting there imagining what difference that would’ve made to their lives. And it gets vetoed by Richard Nixon. Also, in the same time period, the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment was up for ratification.
The ERA was actually written in 1923 and had come up for ratification many years since then. But finally in 1970, it passes the House and the Senate. Once again, it goes to the states for ratification. And this is another book unto itself, but it is not ratified in time to become an amendment to the Constitution. It could still be, I just want to say. So this is a time where there’s enormous hope for change that is also not working out as the feminist movement would’ve hoped.
They absolutely made strides, right? We got Title IX and we got Roe in 1973. It wasn’t like it was all bad, but it was a mixed bag. And I really wanted to show that because I did feel that that tension between hope for change and real change happening, but also other changes being jettisoned had a lot in common with the moment we were living in now.
Marion: Absolutely. I love that you’re able to gather all of those things together. As the Dobbs decision came down, I can only imagine what you were thinking, what you were feeling, but I like the idea of the history and what we have on us driving us forward too. And as we have to wrap this up, want to ask you as a last question about that. About living a value driven life, living a value driven life as a writer.
All of these people that you’ve written about, and your first book for the young writer reveals something about you and what you believe. And I would go so far to say about me that I have to believe it to write it. And there are many things I have not written that I turned down early in my career because I didn’t believe in them. What about living a value driven life as a writer? Is it possible?
Kerri: Yeah. And I think everything you just said resonated with me, and I feel to be true of my own writing life. Even going back to the writing manual, right? I wrote it because it was a book I needed, and it was a book that I thought young writers or any writer just starting out could really benefit from. And that’s a value, right?
Creating the community, creating the mentorship, creating the scaffolding for young people to think of themselves as writers. Those are all things that I value and I take into my future writing career and also my teaching. And so I think it’s pretty clear that this is a pretty pro-reproductive justice book. And also, one of my values was to explore this issue from a number of angles and some unique angles.
I think that we often look at the abortion experience from the perspective of the woman getting it, and that is very important, and those stories need to continue to be told. But I think part of what captured me about the Jane Collective was it was a provider story. And that became something that I was really passionate about in this book.
And why I wanted to write this book is because I think that the bravery of the people then and now who are offering this service illegally need to be recognized. And one other thing I’ll say about that is that the early drafts of this occurred during the real lockdowns of the pandemic.
And even though this is not a book about illness by any stretch of the imagination, it is a book about people who are called to serve and who serve in healthcare, other people at their own peril. And that was something I was really moved by in watching doctors and nurses during the pandemic. It was a value that I wanted to bring to this book.
Marion: Kerri, you couldn’t have left us on a better place. That’s wonderful. Thank you. And I honestly cannot wait to see what you do next. So we’ll be waiting by the bookshop door. Kerri, go get them.
Kerri: Thank you, Marion. It was great to talk to you.
Marion: It was a joy. The writer is Kerri Maher. The book is, All You Have to Do Is Call just out from Penguin Random House. See more on her at kerrimaher dot com. Follow her on Instagram @kerrimaherwriter. Subscribe to her newsletter on Substack. It’s called Sandcastles. 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 overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
