FELICE COHEN IS A PUBLISHING POLYMATH. She knows about many things and has written about them, lectures about them, thereby defying all the laws of publishing that usually advise a writer to stay in one lane. I reached out to Felice because I think she is the best person with whom to discuss the value of writing our stories. Listen in and read along as we discuss that, and much more.
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Marion: Greetings, Felice.
Felice: Hi. How are you?
Marion: I’m good, and I’m really better for having read your work starting with a piece in Medium. I read this interview with you and was really gratified to read that your origin writing story is so much about story. So I thought I’d just whip through that for people to put you in context. You were recruited to play two different division one sports in college. You quit the teams but stayed on by covering the games for the school newspaper. You wrote about sports, which led to writing an opinion piece. During your senior year, you discovered a family secret. Your maternal grandmother, the woman you’re named after, hadn’t died from cancer as you’d been told, but had committed suicide. You asked your grandfather why, and he told you a story you’d never heard, that she’d been in Auschwitz during Holocaust.
So you wrote a column in the newspaper about her life and your grandfather’s response was one of tremendous relief having unburdened himself from her secret. And that’s when he asked you to write his story. And it’s your book What Papa Told Me, and it’s a two time honorable mention book award winner has sold tens of thousands of copies around the world, translated into Polish and continues to be taught in schools as part of their Holocaust curriculum. So look at all that story about story. So you’re the perfect person to ask, what’s the value of writing down our stories?
Felice: That’s a great question. I think for me, it’s you write what you know, but we all have these individual lives and experiences and sometimes they’re universal, and I think you can share your story and others can get something from them. With my grandfather’s story on the Holocaust, his story represents millions of people who didn’t survive. And I still talk about his story even up to now, it’s about hope. No matter what you go through, there’s still that hope to have.
Marion: Yeah, I think so. I think that it’s wonderful how often and how far afield you go and who you speak to about that. I really admire that. People can go to your website and see the lectures you’ve given and the place you’ve given them. And before you wrote that book, you were a professional organizer, a pro at managing space. And when your grandfather got cancer in his late eighties, it really put the pressure on to get that book done. So you write that you put 77 boxes of stuff into storage.
Felice: I’m thinking about 77, yeah.
Marion: And you moved into a 90 square foot Manhattan studio. And after writing an article about how to organize that tiny space, there was a video made and that video went out and it’s had 25 million views to date, and the requests for more interview poured in, but it also really boosted the book about your granddad, and it really started to sell around the world. So in response, you wrote 90 Lessons for Living Large in 90 Square Feet. And I just love your response. It’s like, “Well, then I’ll just write about that.” So the adage is to write what as you said, which you did, but taking that advice to heart, switching from the Holocaust to a space organizing book, which is also a life guide. It’s not literally just how to store your stuff, but that’s fascinating. So talk to me about just changing lanes like that.
Felice: Sure. Well, it’s funny when I speak about my grandfather’s book or if I speak at tiny house festivals around the country, both of the stories are intertwined because like you said, I moved into that tiny apartment so that I could finish writing my grandfather’s book. And because of that tiny apartment and the video going viral, his book sold around the world. And I’d been an organizer for years and I’d always toyed with writing a book on organizing. And I felt like the shelves were already loaded with books like this. I didn’t want to add to the clutter.
So I wanted to write a want to guide to how to live the life you want to live, which is part of my grandfather’s message always about enjoying your life and we have so much stuff or we don’t have time to use the stuff we have. Why is that? And it’s because overwhelmed often by stuff. So I wanted to write a book to help you enjoy your life. Simple lessons, whether you live at 90 square feet or more, it’s just about finding your priority and what do you want to do with that?
Marion: I love that they’re intertwined and I get it totally. On a cellular level, I understand. Absolutely. And I thank you for that because I think a lot of people want to do that, but they think, “Well, I can’t. I’m supposed to stick to this one lane.” And that’s what everybody tells us in publishing. They say, “Stick to your lane, just write what sold last time.” And this gets to your whole polymath thing, which is that you really have written from a lot of different spaces. So didn’t you get the memo to stick to your lane sister?
Felice: You know it’s funny, when I was eight, my father had a business card made for me, and it listed puzzles and math and basketball, and he always said, “You can do all the things you love to do.” And that’s the lane I stuck on, the multiple lane.
Marion: I’m so glad I asked. He had a business card made for you. Yeah, there you go. And that’s just it. If we don’t get that advice, we don’t take that advice. And when we first hear it, we think Why? Because you really go out after a whole lot of different topics, which we’re going to get to and including in this just really wonderful memoir. You’ve written four memoirs, but your most recent one I want to talk about is called Half In, in which she won the 2022 outstanding LGBT Book Award of the Year for fiction and nonfiction from the Independent Author Network. And it examines among several great themes, forbidden love, and at the time, at the age you were the position of the woman with whom you fell in love, her age, all this made it forbidden.
But forbidden love, I was thinking about this. It’s a really tricky thing to write about because well, if we’re lucky, times change. And while we could debate that back and forth right now considering the politics of America, but times have changed. You grew up anyway. Same sex love is less of an issue, thank God. But let’s talk about recreating the strong emotional content of a time before. Did you find that difficult to write about something that was forbidden then that maybe now isn’t so forbidden? I mean, how do you do that exactly?
Felice: Yeah. In the early nineties when the affair began, it was don’t ask, don’t tell. And today it’s love is love is love. But I think I started writing this book about 16 years ago right after she died. And it was written not to be a book. It was written for therapy for myself, and it was just writing it down. And because I mourned her as I loved her in secret, so I just kept writing and writing. So I’ve been writing about this all these years and it wasn’t like I just started writing.
So it started off and the book has morphed so many times. I’m probably 600 different edits and just over and over and how I wanted to tell the story. And as I got more comfortable with myself and my own sexuality and the secret, the society also became more comfortable with it. And I think we both grew at the same time. So now that I felt better about it was easier to, in a way, come out with this forbidden love story.
Marion: Yeah. That’s lovely. And you mentioned the length of time that you were writing about it and that she died, did that allow for you to write it more so do you think?
Felice: She was always supportive of my writing. I don’t know if I would’ve written it had she not died. I had no one really to talk to explain how I was feeling and writing for me was always go to my journals. And that’s really how I even started this book, Half In. I took all my journal entries and typed them up, and I took all of our letters. I had gotten the letters I sent her back before she died, and I just typed it all up. And that was the jumping point of this book.
Marion: That’s interesting. You got all the letters that she had written back before she died, which would allow you to recreate a frame of mind a little bit better. The language we use at one age is very different than the language we use at another, especially when we’re talking about longing and belonging and love. So the original material, did you get them all at once?
Felice: Yeah. They were all in a bag for me, and when you’re starting to read them all through, you just, it was cathartic as well. You’ve relive it. And I worked with my grandfather and his story. He had to relive all those experiences and the Holocaust, and that’s tough. It’s hard, but it was again, cathartic. It was a way of just seeing how the love developed. And every time I sat down to do a new edit, I got excited because I thought, here I am going in how we met and then how we fell in love, and then what happened through that. And it was a nice walk down memory lane.
Marion: That’s lovely, because every time I have a memoir writer on who’s written about trauma, I ask them their opinion and I’ll ask you, but you have the trauma of your grandfather and the Holocaust, but you also have the beauty of being able to reread this process of falling in love. So I’ll ask you, what are we asking a memoir writer to do when we ask her to go back and look at something? Are we asking her to reanimate it? Are we asking her to relive it, or are we asking her to coolly stand here and report on it from here? What do you think is the process that we’re requiring of a memoirist when they look back at something?
Felice: I think it really depends on the memoirist. How do you want to tell the story? When I teach memoir writing, you find that life event that had the most significance or impact on you, and how do you want to tell that story? Do you want to do it chronologically and build up to it? Do you want to go back and forth? And I felt, for me, I wanted to write it as though it were a novel as though it were fiction. And that’s how I wanted it to come across. A lot of people say to me, it felt like I was reading a novel because that’s the book I like to read.
So that’s how I wanted it to read. But starting, it didn’t sound like that. It really took a lot of edits and edits and morphing into the story I wanted to tell. And with my editors, the biggest thing was asking me, “Felice, but what do you feel?” Because as a journalist it’s easier to tell, well, this happened, this happened, but I had to go back in and put in how I really felt, and that was the hardest part. That was the last layer I had to put in. And it’s funny because now that the book is out there, I feel free of this secret. That really is what I needed from this memoir, whether anybody else read it or not.
Marion: That’s lovely. I read that you had talked to a therapist and you wrote in a lovely essay in 2022 in the Gay and Lesbian Review that coincides with the publication of the book. You write of the love affair, you chronicle, in that book and you write that you felt stuck in the past and your therapist said, in order to move on, you need to tell your story. And you did. So that’s amazing. Who else in your life gives you good writing advice along with a therapist?
Felice: My dad for sure, he’s brilliant. He’s an attorney. He’s written a million briefs and papers, and so he was my editor on the What Papa Told Me book, and he was one of the first editors on Half In before I went for other editors. But I mean, we always joke that if your father hasn’t edited your sex scenes, then you haven’t lived because I’m having a total complete panic attack right now. It’s been really funny, but I think that’s why I put in a little sarcasm and a little humor to distance myself from it. But it was also helpful in the way that I said, “Well, here I am…” I’m now in my 50s. I was 23 then, so it gave me distance when he was editing about me at 23. It was a little less embarrassing and we’re close, so we were able to talk about it and then laugh about it, but it’s pretty funny.
Marion: So do you read aloud to him? Do you hand him pages? Do you hand him pages as you’re going? People always ask me for advice if they have somebody who’s willing to read and who is a good reader, which I always say get someone who’s invested in your success, but who also has the skills. So just give me a sense of how you do that. Do you hand over the pages as you’re writing or do you give him a chunk or how does it work?
Felice: I usually will print it out and give it to him. And it’s interesting, the What Papa Told Me book came out in, I think it was 2010, my dad has Parkinson’s. So editing back then with a red pen he used to do when I was in college and it would come back looking like it was bled all over. And I loved it because it was tough at first, but it’s only making the story better. So as the years went on, it was harder for him to write. So I would still give him pages and make the font larger. And sometimes he would still edit it, and if he couldn’t, then he would look at it and read it to me and I would be next to him typing it on my laptop the edits, and then I would reread it and he would hear it, and then he might give me other edits.
Marion: The idea of making the font larger actually brought tears right into my eyes. These are the kinds of details that make story. That is such a loving gesture, what you just said, the idea that you accommodated your editor as he developed through his Parkinson’s, that’s just really touching and gorgeous, and I hope you’ll write about that sometime about what we do. That’s a love story right there. That’s beautiful. Oh my goodness. So before we just both have to lie down and start sobbing, let me move on to a project you’re undertaking right now.
You are amid producing a series of books called The Fancy Tales to Date, including three books, She’safella, A Modern Day Cinderella with a gay twist, a modern day Peter Pan — come on, we’ve always known Peter was gay — and a modern day Jack and the Beanstalk, and Jack too, I would argue, but yes, with a gay twist. So it’s narrated by a different tooth fairy. The Fancy Tales are soon to be joined by Sleeping Booty, Beauty and the Butch, Little Red Writer in the Hood, Goldie, Locks and the Three Smears, Kitty and Boots. Yeah, I love this. So it just begs the question, what do they offer that make them so perfect for a messaging reboot right now?
Felice: Well, we know them so well. We all know the fairytales. And I think just giving them a little twist in a modern day society. I’m a volunteer in Central Park, I love the park and there are so many statues in the park, and for me, Central Park is magical. So that’s where the stories take place and that’s where the magic happens. And there are like three bear statues. So there’s a statue of a witch and a goose. So it’s like Mother Goose and the Bad Witch. And there are all these stories that lend themselves, and I think just taking these stories with an LGBT twist that it’s just straightforward. It was just fun to do.
Marion: Yeah. I hope so because fun to read and they’re even more fun to look forward to. And I love that it’s in the park. I grew up in New York City and magical things do happen in the park. They’re perfectly placed. So as the listeners can understand, this idea of calling you a polymath is really right. If you look it up in the dictionary, it’s defined as a person with a wide range of interests and expertise in various fields and individual whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. And that’s how I see you. It’s that solve specific problems thing I think that I was really drawn to as I started to think about the idea of polymath. And you’re asking us to till some serious stuff here as you’re asking us to consider the Holocaust, as you’re asking us to consider forbidden love, and as you’re asking us to reboot these very well-known tales.
So what authority do you think it takes to take on this tilling of the important stuff of life, but to do it with, and you’re a very entertaining writer. As you said, you use a rye in sarcastic tone sometimes and humor. But I mean there’s something you’ve decided to do that I’m just trying to get at the confidence or the authority or along with that business card your father gave her you when you were a kid. What else were you packing that says, yeah, I can do this?
Felice: I’m the oldest of three girls. I think my parents just instilled in me that we could do anything. And I started off in college as a math major, and I got through Calc III and I always thought, “What am I doing?” Yeah, it was a nightmare. So halfway through myself-
Marion: I’m impressed.
Felice: And after Calc III, and I said, “I’m so lost.” I spent a weekend reading the course catalog and I read every major and nothing appealed to me. And then I found a major that you could create your own based on all these different interests. And I thought, “I have so many interests.” I always love doing lots of things. And one thing I love are jigsaw puzzles, which are putting lots of different things together. And I think for me, being organized is the basis that it allows me to do all these things because I’m organized and for organizing, I look at it not so much as having a neat space, but having more time to do the things you love. Yeah.
Marion: That question really does need to be addressed. This whole idea of you were a professional organizer and there’s so much about writing that beginning writers don’t understand that is purely organizational. And people come to me, I work with writers all day long, and they think that it’s almost all mystical, that something drops from the muse into your head and it comes out your fingers and it comes out from page one to page 365. And God, I hope it does for somebody, but it does not for me. A, nothing writes itself, that’s just true. And B, suddenly you’ve got these 500 shards and I think of them as shards. They’re sharp edge, little insistent things that you’ve written that want to be stitched together and you need some organizational skills. So do you think being a professional organizer has gotten under and helped you out with your writing?
Felice: I think it has. In terms of people always say, “How do you get motivated to do it?” And I’ve always had to motivate myself. I’ve had jobs where I had to get it to a place at a certain time, but for the most part, when you’re writing, I would come home from jobs and I would write at night. I would spend weekends writing. I could be on a Friday night at a library or a Starbucks writing, and it’s organizing your time and planning ahead. And sometimes there are times I just feel like I don’t feel like writing and I’ll set my phone for 45 minutes, shut off my notifications and get in the seat. So that motivates me. Sometimes I’ll say, I’ll take 15 minutes and do laundry, wash the dishes, make the bed, get everything ready, and then sit down to write. And sometimes I need to have an organized workspace. And I think that helps because we see distractions, it distracts our minds. If you want to be able to write and clear your mind, you need to remove distractions.
Marion: Well, it’s true. I give the advice to people to be hospitable and what that means, even when I was living in my one bedroom, tiny little brownstone apartment and on the Upper West side, the desk was also in the living room, which was also the dining room and everything else except for the bedroom and bathroom. And I just kept one part of that desk clean of anything. No bills went on there, no taxes went on there. And I learned early on that if you could get access to it and you didn’t have to remove stuff from it and get lost in the taxes or the bills, that you could be hospitable to your talent. I could be hospitable to my talent more specifically.
And I give that advice that as you get older and if you’re fortunate enough to have an office or whatever, same thing. No taxes on that desk, no bills on that desk. If you can get a clear shot to it, it’s the grace of work. So it sounds like you’re able to work in short spurts, you’re busy. I know you do a lot of things. Do you try to write five days a week, do try to write… Do you have any other practice advice that you can pass on?
Felice: Yeah. I like to work in 45 minute spurts. If at the end of that 45 minutes, if I’m in the middle of something, I reset the timer and keep going. If not, I’ll stretch. I’ll get a drink. I’ll do it a few minutes, check email, and I’ll go again. But I like to start early in the morning. That’s when the emails aren’t really coming in yet. I’m not distracted and it’s quiet and I can just go and I try to do 4:00 to 6:00, 45 minute spurts a day, and when I can get them done, I feel productive.
Marion: That’s lovely. I like the 45. That’s interesting. I mean, I’ve heard everything. I’ve heard about the tomato timer and the 20 minutes and the this and the that. I don’t care if you wear a flipping bunny suit to the work as long as you get it done. That’s what I say to people all the time. Just find a way to get to the, if you even have to bribe yourself, big hunks of dark chocolate work for me. Just get there and stay there for some allotted amount of time. So you’ve got a 45 minute gig and I think that’s great. That’s wonderful.
We talked before about this whole idea of being a polymath and not getting the memo that you’re supposed to just do one thing. And I started to think in your specific example, you were discovered, that’s such a silly word, but your work really was percolated up on YouTube with that video. And then you’ve done some self-publishing, you’ve done some lecturing. You do social media and so much more. And I wonder if that is giving people more confidence specifically, did it give you more confidence? The idea that we have all these different platforms these days, do you think that gives people more confidence to do different varied topics or just spread out more?
To me, it feels like there’s more elbow room if you try a little YouTube and you try a little TikTok and you try a little of this. But I don’t know, that may be just me. What about you? Did it boost your confidence to see the success of the YouTube and then you said, “Well, I can write about anything if I can be a YouTube star.” I don’t know, what was the effect?
Felice: I don’t know if it boosts my confidence, but I didn’t set out thinking, I want to write about this, I want to write about that. It just naturally fell in my lap. I started the personal memoir pretty much before my grandfather’s book. It was just something I worked on a little with dealing with the affair, and then I put it aside. But I think sometimes as great as social media can be, it can also be a distraction and a time suck. But what a lot of them say is, if you want to be an author or writer, you have to promote yourself on social media. And I think it’s finding the right social media platform that works for you. You don’t have to do Facebook and TikTok and Instagram. YouTube was a surprise with that video. That just was bonkers. It was early on with YouTube.
And the video now has found a new life on TikTok. So I’m getting lots of messages from people saying, “Are you still in that tiny apartment?” And I’m always happy to talk about the apartment or the tiny living or organizing or the Holocaust or this personal memoir. And it did give me confidence in a way, I think with my writing when people start reading it. I wrote my grandfather’s book not thinking anybody would buy any copies. I wrote it as just a gift for him. And I went in with that mindset of, “I love to write. I want to do and be creative. People buy the book, great. If they don’t buy the book, okay. I mean, I’d love them to, but I just want to keep writing more books and being able to do what I love to do.”
Marion: That’s lovely. And of course, it’s so pure of heart. Is it the same intent that you bring to the table every day now?
Felice: Pretty much. I’m working on a new book and it’s based on every letter I’ve ever been sent in my life. For some reason I’ve saved them and you know I’m not a saver.
Marion: I was going to say this flies in the face of the 90 square feet.
Felice: But paper doesn’t take up much room. I mean, I have over a thousand letters from family and friends and exes, and I might do a trilogy and start with the letters from exes as a graphic novel because I love graphic novels and it makes it fun, and I can be quirky and put in sarcastic comments.
Marion: I love that. Alison Bechdel is one of my absolute all time idols. And the idea of the graphic memoir has really taken hold. And I’m seeing so many varieties of it, not just the cartoon cells, but people using medical records and menus and all kinds of ephemera from their lives. And I think that’s exciting. I cannot wait to see what you do with this. So thank you and good luck. I’m a super fan and it’s a joy to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming along today and talking with me.
Felice: Well, thank you, Marion. It was a pleasure.
Marion: You’re most welcome. The writer is Felice Cohen. See more on her at felice cohen dot com. Get her books wherever books are sold. You can follow her on Instagram and on Facebook. So for more information on speaking engagements or anything else, go to her website. I’m Marion and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios com. Our producer is Jaquelin Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey.
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