AMY WILSON IS THE author of the memoir, When Did I Get Like This? The Screamer, The Warrior, The Dinosaur Chicken Nugget Buyer, and Other Mothers I Swore I’d Never Be, as well as the co-host of the popular parenting podcast, What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. The author of The Motherload, a one-woman show which toured to 16 cities after its hit off-Broadway run, she has appeared as an actor on Broadway and as a series regular on TV sitcoms. Her new book is Happy to Help, Adventures of a People Pleaser, just out from Zibby Books. Listen in and read along as we talk about how to ask and answer a big life questions when writing memoir, and so much more.
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MARION: Welcome, Amy.
AMY: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
MARION: Well, it’s a joy to have you here. And my audience is writers, and they want help. So, let’s break down your recent book idea. This is a book for any woman who has too much to do. And as we all know, this means every woman since we are uniquely assigned too much to do. So, let’s start there. I teach and write memoir, and I always tell my students that all memoir asks a question. So, did this begin with a question? Did you ask yourself, why am I so…? Or give us a sense of just the minute of inspiration here for this book.
AMY: So it actually began with a blank space, which is interesting. Zibby Owens and I connected over her having liked my first book. And she said, “Why haven’t you written a second book? And I said, well, I have. And it’s been a long road.”
And she said, “Well, why don’t you pitch me some ideas?” So we pitched ideas to one another on a call so that I could turn the best one into a proposal. And the best one that we came up with was this idea that there are different times in our lives as women that we have to give ourselves slack, that we have to give other people slack, that we have to pick up the slack. The different properties of slack would be what the book was about or the way in.
And I said, okay, I’ll start there. I’ll see where it goes. And so, the first thing I did was I whiteboarded out these different categories, right?
When were the times in my life that I really needed to, you know, give somebody else some space, whatever? And no matter how long I thought about it, after a couple of weeks, the one column that had nothing in it was when were the times in my life I needed to pick up the slack that I had under-delivered and, you know, needed to work harder.
There was not a time in my life that I hadn’t, in fact, really over-delivered, sometimes to my detriment, certainly at times maybe when other people might’ve given up sooner. And it was that. Then I realized, Oh, that’s what the book is about. The book is why do I over-deliver? Why do I keep going with the dead-end relationship or the thankless job or the unsolvable thing, thinking if I just try harder, I could make it work.
And why am I like that? And some other people aren’t. And that was the question that the book became about.
MARION: I love that. And I think that people don’t understand that, that we walk around wondering about things, thinking about things, and that great ideas come from that kind of inquiry. And I’m delighted that this good publisher engaged you on that level, because that’s exactly what’s needed. We need someone to bounce ideas around with.
And the other thing that just, well, there are many things about this book that fascinate me, but one of the things that fascinates me about you is that writers are frequently told to stick to one lane, fiction or not. And if it’s nonfiction, you stick with biography or memoir or history, but you do two very curious things in your creative life. The first of which is to have created a brand around motherhood and God bless you, it’s not that treacly stuff that first prevailed on the internet where everyone was perfect and no one had boogers on their shirts. And then to take this brand across platforms.
So let’s start with brand. Set this up for me. When and how did mothering, motherhood, mothers become the brand or the interest or however you would characterize it? And then we’ll discuss the platforms in a minute.
AMY: So it started because I was an actor. As you said, I did a lot of sitcoms. I did Broadway, off-Broadway. Then in short order, I had two kids in two years and really stepped off the, that was an exit ramp for a while, trying to sort of on-ramp back onto the highway. I had always written my own material – sketch comedy and solo shows and things like that – to just give myself opportunities to perform. And so I wrote Motherlode because that was the reality I was living at the time and it worked, you know, and it ran in New York for a while as I was actually pregnant with my third child while I was doing it in New York, visibly pregnant, which an actor doesn’t usually get to work when they look like that, but I did because I was doing a show about that stage of life. And then, yeah, we did a tour and it toured around the country for a while. And sometimes I brought my young daughter with me. And sometimes I had an understudy named Betsy Stover, who sometimes would do this one person show sort of as me when it was too far away or too long of a, of an engagement. And out of that, I got a book deal. Somebody kind of came calling and said, do you ever think about writing a book? And I had, and I had this book proposal sort of in the drawer and had it ready to go. And so that crossed over and that became When Did I Get Like This?
It wasn’t the same, but it was sort of one thing led to the next.
And then I thought I was going to try to get out of the parenting lane. I’m going to switch lanes. My agent suggested I write a novel. So, I did. It was not a parenting novel or a parenting related novel. It was not a very good novel. So, I decided that maybe, I was glad with the experience, but I was not a fiction writer.
And while I was sort of recovering from that disappointment, Margaret Ables, who is my What Fresh Hell co-host, she approached me about starting a podcast, which in 2016 was still sort of a, let’s try this, like this new thing and let’s see what happens. And we had no idea where it would lead. And again, we went with parenting because we each had created followings through our parenting content. It was sort of what we had.
And so, let’s build from here. And eight years later, I’m still doing it.
MARION: It’s great. And it answers the question about the building out a branded multi-platform experience, because it’s, somebody comes to you, if you try stuff out in the public, then maybe someone will notice and come to you and say, here’s, have a book or, so that’s terrific. And I’m delighted. And it’s so much fun. I love listening to your various and reading your various aspects of your platform, getting this sort of layered response to the world.
I too am a mother, I have a family. And I too have, you know, my ponytail has been sprung for about 25 straight years. You know, I don’t understand women with hairdos. It’s like, when did you have the time to put that up? Or is it just a way to carry a pen? Because if it’s not a way to carry a pen, I haven’t got time for it. Yeah.
So your new book is Happy to Help, Adventures of a People Pleaser, just out from Zibby Books, as I said, in which you put forth that every woman has too much to do because women are assigned to be happy to help. And we are. But that there comes a point when we have too much on our plate. And when we try to put some of it down, give it back, it’s never easy.
And I did not just laugh and cry through this book, I snorted. And that’s that response that comes only when I’ve read something that’s true, but it’s also a little subversive. And in this case, you got right to the heart of what it’s like to be understood for being misunderstood by oh, everyone, because that’s how I feel all the time. And it was a lovely feeling reading through it was like, “Oh, she understands.” Oh, that’s so nice. Yeah. Well, it’s I think it’s the highest compliment I can pay you. I love the writing. I love the book. I love the pace. But it was that cozy feeling. It was like, I think she’s sitting next to me. I think she’s saying, “There, there.” And no one ever says that. So talk to me about putting your finger on the pulse of this idea a little bit. I mean, we talked about it in the beginning. But the idea of really understanding this aspect of it is a bit subversive, you know, we’re just supposed to keep doing it. But you got in there with this little aspect that, as I said, made me snort. So let’s just dig deeper into that.
AMY: The part that I really wanted to get across to the reader that I imagined as I was writing, was just this: What if there’s nothing wrong with you?
MARION: I’m sorry, I have to lie down now.
AMY: Talk about being subversive. What if there’s nothing wrong with you?
What if you have too much to do, and there’s nothing wrong with you, you just actually have too much to do?
Yeah, because there’s times in our lives when all of us have, you know, the deadline at work and the sick toddler and the broken dishwasher. And that’s not your workaholism coming to the, you know, or your perfectionism acting up again. That’s just the situation you’re in.
But I think women, first of all, we’re given this when we ask for help, I think we’re assigned to fix ourselves instead. But we do sort of take that on, this that there must be something wrong with me that I can’t handle what I’m dealing with right now. That this is more than I can handle, I guess I need to get a sense of humor or get up earlier or lean in or, you know, or all of the above.
And I know, and I’ve tried all of those things. I’ve been around long enough that I’ve tried all of those different kinds of advice. And I go through the sort of different decades and the different advice that was offered along the way as I was growing up. And I was an early and avid reader. So, I consumed it all and really tried to do it all. And all of it, I found lacking in some ways. And I think it was because of this, that sometimes you just have too much to do.
MARION: Yeah, I love the phrase, “assigned to fix ourselves.” It took me years to understand that it wasn’t like there wasn’t some memo that had gone out to all the people of the other genders that, you know, in my life that they really weren’t ganging up on me. It’s just that women get told five or so pat things over and over. And for instance, and well, let’s just say a trigger warning here since every single woman listening to this is about to experience the same damn feeling when they hear these quotes, but here they are, “You know, you do too much, or you need to give something up. Or as you said before, “Why are you such a perfectionist? Or why are you tired all the time?
And I can feel the discomfort in the listeners already. But I want you to drill into locating a book in that too. These nearly universal things said to women, you could have just written a screed. But instead, you took some authority. And so, let’s talk about authority. It’s a different kind of authority than an angry screed or any of the labels we can put at it. I think a lot of writers listening think that authors and their authority are out of their reach since they have day-to-day, you know, quotidian lives.
And in that day-to-day quotidian space, you’ve made success. So speak to me about recognizing or utilizing your what I call authority. You may call it anything, but that’s what I’m thinking you did.
AMY: My friend Jess Leahy calls it “your expert voice.” And I talked to her early on about this book, because I said, the first draft kind of felt like two different books that it was funny stories. And then it were these larger points that I wanted to make, but they felt like two different books. And it got maybe a little “TED talk” in points.
And she said, well, are there places where you’re quoting experts where maybe you are the expert? You know, your lived experience is enough of enough of a proof. If you know these things to be true, and you can, you know, enlighten them with a story from your own life, you don’t need to also say every time, as Betty Friedan said, you know what I mean? You can cut some of that, know that you’re right as you say these things, and you are the expert. And so that helped me as I went through, like, when do I need to prove my point with a little bit of research or a quote? And when does the story stand on its own? And finding the right balance of that was probably the primary thing we went through in the editing process.
MARION: I think that’s such an interesting point, because I think one of the other things a lot of us think is that we don’t have original thought we have inherited from Betty Friedan, from whomever we’re reading, and that we do need to annotate everything.
AMY: Right.
MARION: And of course, that’s not true in a book like this, in a book from this personal experience. And it gives I think the people listening, it’ll give them some courage and some, well, authority, which is really important.
So, this memoir is told in essays. What is it about the structure of a collection of essays that appealed to you?
AMY: Well, I wanted to draw from different points in my life. And I was working with my friend, Jenny Nash’s book, Blueprint for a Memoir, where it was very helpful to me because I didn’t want to write and then this happened and then this happened, right? When memoir falls short for me, it’s when it’s just a collection of things that happened, but it doesn’t add up to something.
MARION: Right.
AMY: I was really starting with this point I wanted to make. And if the story was in the book, it had to elucidate something about this central point. And what Jenny Nash’s writing taught me is that being chronological might not at all be what you need to prove the character growing and changing. The character learns something in each essay that she then applies to the next lesson, the she being me, but still it’s not really me. It’s the person I’m writing about. And she needs to learn her lessons in a certain order and figure out what those lessons are. But then that’s not necessarily, it’s not chronological at all necessarily.
MARION: Yep.
AMY: And so things very much got out of order. And then I think it became a series of essays once it didn’t, it tells a story and the character grows and changes along the way, but it isn’t The Year of Magical Thinking. It isn’t about one thing. It’s about many different things in my life that all kind of made one point in the end.
MARION: Yeah. Well, I love the point about transcendent change and how we have to evolve. Memoir has to evolve. It has to have a build, even if it’s told in essays, the entire book has to have one single argument and fulfill all the requirements of memoir. And yours does, including exploring one specific aspect of life and not giving us, you know, your whole life story, which is autobiography and not memoir. It opens with the idea that it is not easy for women to do less and where it closes, well, I want everyone to just go buy this book and see how you resolve this wonderfully. But chicken and egg this for me a bit. Did you test any of these essays on the public before you committed to this book? I mean, you talked about how you and Zibby Owens got on the phone and went back and forth. But did you also deploy any of these you have published widely? And I wonder what at what point you said, “Ah, is this what I want to do? Or, you know, how did you do that?”
AMY: You know, I find sometimes when you take something out of the oven too early and show it to somebody that you don’t always get an encouraging response. So, I had only been working on the book for a couple of weeks and I realized that the opening sort of story was going to be me in one day in eighth grade, that that was the opening thing of the book. And at the time my daughter was in eighth grade. So, I thought, okay, it’s going to start with me in eighth grade. It’s going to end with my daughter in eighth grade. And I don’t even know what happens in the middle, but I have the, I know the two clothespins at the ends of the line.
I did it, you know, I did it. And I sat down at dinner that night with my family and said, “So I figured it out. It’s this great idea.” And I tell them about it. And of course they completely underreacted, sent me into a tilt because I thought it was such a good idea. And they’re just really like, so, but what? And so why? And so I honestly learned from that.
I thought to myself, no, this is a good idea. And it is how the book ended up, but I learned like, don’t, yeah, you don’t pull stuff out to show it to people until it’s done. It’s like naming your baby, just wait till your baby’s born and then tell people, because if you tell them when you’re still pregnant, everybody has an opinion and you might not want to hear it.
MARION: Yeah. I mean, I’m, I’m a writer. I’m married. I have a family. I know not to solicit my husband’s opinions on my work when he’s hungry, tired, working, not working. Oh, so in other words, never. So, we just, we have to find either a person as you found in Zibby Owens, a person who is invested in our success and invested in the success of the story or the book to pitch something. When you did have a good firm idea about this, do you write it on a big old piece of cardboard and, you know, slip it on your wall? Do you remind yourself what you’re arguing, what you’re going from and to? Give me a sense of just how you work.
AMY: Yeah, I did. For this, I really did have a spreadsheet. I whiteboarded for a while. And then when I knew what the idea was, I really had a spreadsheet and like, okay, this is the essay where this happens. And what is the yes, what is the point and what is the lesson that the person learns? And then so what is she going to try to do next? And then I would sort of, once I had the all of the essays, we were trying different running orders and it was too many funny ones in a row, it was too many serious ones in a row or whatever, too many eighth grade ones in a row, whatever it was, that seating arrangement gets really complicated.
So, I went back to the spreadsheet and color coded it. And I think that there were times when there are times when you need to put all that away and just scribble, right, and just try stuff for sure. And there are times when I did put all of that away. But when I got stuck, it was good for me to always be able to go back and look at that spine and remember what it was I was trying to write.
And for me, at least, it really helped to figure these things out before I started writing. Like I said, you can get a little too locked down, I needed to then like loosen it up a little bit. And the second draft. I worked with a really good developmental editor named Andrea Robinson. And I want to just give her credit because when I’m saying I didn’t really show it to anybody, the truth is I showed it to her, right? She saw it when it was a preemie. And she really, really challenged me and made the book so much better.
MARION: That’s great. And a developmental editor is something that I really believe in. I’m not a great believer in beta readers and having, as you said before, telling everybody the name of the baby before you give birth or any of that.
But a developmental editor, somebody who’s actually got the goods and can help you and ask you the questions and ask you where the damn pages are and all of that is worth her weight in rubies.
AMY: Absolutely. She was amazing.
MARION: How soon did you go to her?
AMY: Well, so I got this book deal on proposal and on a very hastily written proposal. So it sort of fell into my lap and I had to get to work. It took me about nine months to write the first draft. And then…
MARION: Also on brand for motherhood.
AMY: Right. You’re right. About 40 weeks. And then handed it in and heard a couple months later, you know, we’d like to introduce you to your developmental editor, you know, stay tuned for further developments. And then it was probably another six weeks before I got her very long, very daunting, absolutely excellent letter. It was probably 10 pages, single spaced. And it was just so good.
You know, I read that letter and thought, oh my gosh, I have to do everything in this letter. I have to, I have to because she’s right. Every word of this is absolutely correct. And what has to happen next, but I don’t know if I can do it. And so then she also had the yes, you can do it part that I really needed and stayed with me through several, you know, maybe a year of more permutations and let’s try this and let’s do that. So I was so grateful for that. And it took a while. Yeah.
It took a while.
MARION: So the Zibby universe has a developmental editor built into the process once they say yes to the book?
Well, I think it’s, it’s case by case and, and because Zibby books is pretty new, I believe that I am the first book that’s come to fruition, that was not a novel that was, you know, where the manuscript was purchased. I believe this is the first book they bought on proposal. They’ve bought a few that actually is now being published.
So it was definitely an act of generosity on their part thinking, “Okay, that’s what this book needs.” And instead of just throwing it back, we’re going to hire a developmental editor.
MARION: Well, that’s what I’ve heard is that they’re building in layers. And I think that that’s really good. And it’s an interesting and I think appropriate model. I’ve had great editors in the books that I’ve published, just astonishing editors who made me give them pages once a month who sat with me knee to knee. And then most of that disappeared in the world of publishing. And in some books, I’ve had an editor I met once, and that’s it.
And I would prefer the knee to knee.
I would prefer that 10 page terrifying letter any day of the week. If someone wants to make my work better, please do. But it’s a lot of work to have somebody overlooking the language, the copy, the, you know, the individual pieces. But how exciting. I mean, how wonderful for you.
So, the book has such great drive and build as you heighten and add to this idea of how it’s not easy to do less and give us the backstory on you of how you grew and learned and took on a life that resists offloading yourself.
So, did you write more than you needed?
In other words, did you discover things that you said, “Well, that’s not really on brand, but oh, look, I wrote this piece. Oh, it’s not really about this.” But you know, this is just such an extraordinary invitation to consider that I just wonder if there was more production than you could use.
AMY: Not a lot more. Not a lot. Some things were added later on as we were moving along this idea of the eldest daughter and eldest daughter syndrome very much entered the social media chat.
And so and I am an eldest daughter, I’m an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter. And so my Zibby Books editor came to me and said, “I really think you have to make it you’ve to thread that through the book too.” So, we went back and added that. So I would say more was that things were added later. Can you say something about this? Can you add something about that? But no, I didn’t have too many because I did this all this work ahead of time, which again, walking down too early has its own issues, right? But for me, it did prevent false starts. No, I didn’t throw away four essays that didn’t work or anything.
Once I knew the story I was going to tell and why it was in there, it stayed for the most part.
MARION: Well, I think that really speaks to the value of having an argument and understanding how you’re going to structure that argument and what scenes from your life you’re going to choose to deploy that transcendent change, you know, to illustrate that transcendent change.
So these essays are all a joy to read. As I said, I snorted my way through the entire book. But let’s take one and talk about it.
You have this lovely essay that you constructed, soldering together those women’s magazines you grew up with publications like Women’s Day and Good Housekeeping and that Ladies Home Journal with that column, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” One of my personal favorites when I was a kid, loved that.We were kids. We were not the target audience, but we were reading it. Now we’re reading it and we’re also, you know, the whole time we’re like, is my parents marriage one of those?
AMY: Like, right. Should I send it in?
MARION: Right. You know, they’re sleeping in separate… So the piece wends its way into that iconic, I Hate to Cook book, which as far as I know, was in every single household I grew up in, you know, grew up knowing and you make your way to the Equal Rights Amendment. It’s so sneaky. I just love that. I was like, oh, we’re going to go there. Are we? Okay. So this is great build and into and through your thinking on how your mother and you share an existence right at the fine point of wits end, which is great. It’s like we live on wit’s end.
AMY: Yep.
MARION: And that might go badly if the piece merely complained, but it doesn’t. Since you teach us that while we might feel overwhelmed and everyone is telling us to figure out what we can take off that plate of ours, we’re not nuts, right?
We’re not perfectionists.
We’re not rigid. And while we continually get advice back about how to fix ourselves, instead of the help you need to feel seen, the change is only possible once you reject this idea that you must fix something about yourself.
And I just love you for that. So huge hug. But that took some serious work to get there.
AMY: Yes.
MARION: So short of checking into a facility and thinking this through for a year, which you can’t do because you had too much on your plate. How did you get to that conclusion that we’re not the problem? That fixing yourself, there’s nothing broken in yourself. That just fascinates me that you got there and that that redemption is okay enough, however you want to phrase it.
AMY: You know, I’m trying to remember like when was the moment that I realized that? And I can’t say that I had one moment, but it was so important to me to include the I Hate to Cook Book and Irma Bombeck, which in the 70s, for the youngsters listening, she was a humor columnist. She was in every newspaper. She was on Good Morning America. And she just was just a brilliant short essays once a week.
And my mother just loved her and would often tape her essays to the refrigerator. And so I would read them over and over again, just like I read, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” I would read Irma Bombeck.
And my mother would laugh about all of this stuff. And so I went back and looked at those because I was so curious, like those were great. But was there something missing? And there was. And what was missing is they were products of the 70s. So these two brilliant women were writing about this and giving women this feeling of being seen. “You’re not alone in feeling this way.” But where it got left off, it’s like, but there’s nothing you can do about it. You can just get a sense of humor, ladies, because we’re making dinner every night and it stinks, but we’re doing it anyway. There’s no…
MARION: In heels.
AMY: In heels, right. Yeah. Here you are, you’re making dinner. Here’s what you do. And if it addressed getting somebody to help, it’s like, well, that’s a waste of time. They’re not going to help. Nobody’s going to change their mind. So here’s 10 things to do with a can of tuna. And I thought, that’s interesting. They didn’t tell you what to do.
You could get a sense of humor. You could laugh while cooking or cook while laughing. But what happens when it’s not funny anymore?
And it didn’t really tell you what to do when you get to wit’s end, when this is breaking. And there is that moment, there’s a moment in the essay where I see my mother really just breaking down. The only time I ever saw her do it, the, “I can’t do this anymore.” She had five children, no household help of any kind. That wasn’t a thing in Scranton, Pennsylvania in the eighties. And she just, you know, she just fell apart for like 90 seconds and then she got up and made dinner.
MARION: Yes.
AMY: And it was just this window for me and like, wait a minute, what happens when this isn’t so funny? Yikes. Well, let’s go back to pretending it’s funny. And I think we do that. I think we still do that. But I think we are in a better place. I think all these years later we are being offered, you don’t have to accept the way things are.
MARION: Yes. It’s as though you gave us an act three to the Irma Bombeck thing. It’s so interesting to me, because I think of everything in terms of three acts. And you said, and I encourage writers to think this way, like you grew up with these ideas, but is there now through your education or your experience or through feminism or anything, is there now sort of an act three to this idea that you grew up with? And that’s what you did. You said, “It’s only possible if you reject this idea that there’s something wrong or something that needs to be fixed about you.” And for all of us, Amy, I just want to say thank you for that. Because that idea needed a third act and you gave it to us in this beautiful book.
AMY: I’m just delighted that you enjoyed it. Thank you, Marion.
MARION: You’re so welcome. The author is Amy Wilson. The book is Happy to Help, Adventures of a People Pleaser, just out from Zibby Books. Get it wherever books are sold. To keep up with Amy, follow her at Amy Wilson, but it’s A-M-Y-W-L-S-N on Twitter. And What Fresh Hell at what fresh hell podcast 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 Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach 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.
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