MEMOIR WRITERS MUST FIND a major theme when writing their work. After all, memoir is not autobiography. So, to discuss how to locate a theme in your memoir, I invited Jon Kinnally onto the podcast. Along with his writing partner, Tracy Poust, he has written for such TV shows as “Will & Grace,” “Ugly Betty,” “Two Broke Girls,” as well as many others. Over the years they have received several Emmy nominations as well as a Writers Guild Award for Outstanding Writing in Episodic Comedy. Jon Kinnally has now turned his eye to memoir and has just published his debut book, I’m Prancing As Fast As I Can: My Journey From a Self-Loathing Closet Case to a Successful TV Writer with Some Self-Esteem. Just out from Permuted Press. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to find a major theme when writing, and so much more.

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Jon: Thank you for having me.

Marion: Well, it’s a joy to have you here because, well, for many reasons. The book is a complete delight and as well as a terrific argument. And so, we’re going to just jump right in and talk about openings. Openings are important.

Jon: I agree.

Marion: Setups are essential to letting the reader know what’s at stake. And I’ve rarely read a memoir opening that is more on brand for what the title promises. Yours opens with getting a shot of ketamine and then, within paragraphs, takes us on a quick world tour of gay history and its inheritance, all done while sitting in the writer’s room of a major TV show, thereby defining the territory this book will cover. Nicely done and hard to do.

Jon: Thank you very much.

Marion: You’re welcome. My audience is writers, mostly memoir writers, and they want to know how to do exactly that. Create an opening that puts the lens on the nose of the reader that tells them what to read for. So set this up for us. Was this your first idea or were there other openings that got rewritten along the way? Just tell us how you created this opener.

Jon: Oh, I just had AI write it. No, I’m kidding.

Marion: No one’s given me that answer yet. That was a very brave thing to say, but I know it’s not true.

Jon: And there’s a time that that will be coming soon. And I worry about a lot of stuff, and I worry about that. What is that going to do to writing books? I mean, we all think of that, writers probably. That might be for another discussion.

Marion: Yeah, we can do that.

Jon: Okay, back to the point.

I had decided I wanted to write a book, and the reason I decided is because I wasn’t doing much. It was COVID, and Tracy and I were lucky to get a job during COVID. Not many writers did, but it wasn’t a long enough job, and they started shortening orders for TV shows. And so the money wasn’t coming in like it was, and then there were strikes. It seemed like everyone went on strike, writers, directors. Then there weren’t jobs, and according to my friends who stayed in the States, there still aren’t many jobs in writing television. So with that in mind, I wanted to write. So I had written a few stories for storytelling shows that my friends would give around L.A. and asked me over the years to do it. I’d written a few. You know, I thought, well, maybe there’s some money to be made off this. Use something I’ve already written. So I started to write a few more, and then I talked to my agent, and I said, I have a book. I’ve sent him a bunch of the stories. And he kind of said, and not in these words, but he said, “You know, you’re a middle-aged gay white guy. No one gives a shit.” And I guess I thought, oh, he’s right, because times have changed. Like the memoir of just your standard middle-aged gay white guy was not, my time had passed, I was told. Not just by him, by other people I spoke to. Agents of writers who would just take my call and just have a discussion with me about it.

And then finally, my husband, Chris Young, and his partner, Susan Ottaviano, had written a book, The Green Witch’s Guide to Magical Plants and Flowers. And they had a publisher, I’m sorry, they had an agent named Lisa Hagen. And she took my book, and she found a publisher, Permuted Press, and they agreed to publish it. And I was excited, you know, this middle-aged gay white guy was going to have a book out. And by the way, I was in favor, I don’t mean to sound resentful or anything, because I understand the concept that a certain person’s time may have come, and it’s time for others to take over and have their voices heard. And I get that, 100%. But still, I was writing my stories, and very glad that I had a place to publish them.

But here’s the thing, to answer your question more specifically. I was kind of told by everyone that if it was to have a chance, it had to have kind of a point of view. It wasn’t going to be just funny stories that kind of wasn’t in anymore, it needed a kind of point of view. And I landed on this thing when Chris and I were having coffee one day outside a coffee shop in West Hollywood several years ago. And we had our dog Daisy with us, and these two twinks walked by. And they stopped, and they looked at our dog Daisy, and they started petting her and saying how cute she was. And they never looked at us or made eye contact or acknowledged us in any way, and then they just moved on. And we were laughing to ourselves, like, did they even see us? Literally, were we just hazy blurs in front of them? You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if they said something like, “This poor dog is all alone, we’ve got to take it somewhere.”

And so that started me thinking just on the idea that, like, we’re invisible, you know, especially in Hollywood. Maybe in other places you’re visible until you’re 40, but not in West Hollywood. And I also, as I talk about in the book, had this run-in with a younger writer who didn’t know what Stonewall was. He referred to it as “Stonehenge,” and I worried. I worried about the state of writing, the future of writing when it came to gay guys. And I worried, and this is going to sound crazy now, but this was several years ago, that with the rights that gays were, LGBTQ people were gaining, would art still be as interesting? Where would the creativity come from? In my experience, it had always come from pain and shame and negative things. And I turned that into humor as a way of, like, pulling myself out of that. And I think that’s not an uncommon thing among gay LGBTQ writers. We often use comedy to mask our pain.

And the more I thought about it, I just kind of was like, Well, if there’s less pain, will there be less creativity? And, you know, I think in general, I don’t think you can paint with such a huge brush, but I thought in general that’s probably a thing. So I thought maybe that’s my way in. And I did not want to write a book that preached or talked down to anyone or had the, I’m doing quotes, “get off my lawn,” or “you kids don’t know how good you had it” kind of elder gay. I did not want to have that. And I hopefully don’t. But I did have that going in. It gave me something to work from. And with the stories I had already written, I could kind of rewrite to meet that theme. And then the other ones kind of came from that theme. And now Trump is back in office, and I’m suddenly like, well, now we kind of need each other again. Like young gays who may not remember life before gay marriage, or what it was like in the before times. Well, you know, we’re all going to have an education and we’re all going to have, we’re all going to need each other. And they might need to know what their elder gays went through. And I keep saying gays, but I mean, LGBTQ elders had gone through in the struggle and the fight. And now we’re all in this together.

Marion: Yes, we are.

Jon: For better or worse.

Marion: Yeah, for better or for worse. Well, you mentioned the advice that you got that it has to have a sort of overarching principle. And I always say that all nonfiction is an argument. And you’re arguing strongly in this fine book in favor of moving past merely gazing at your secret desire and instead inhabiting it fully. And the book delivers that argument magnificently, building into each essay another step on the path to personal freedom. And your freedom road began in a dismal gay bar in the Deep South in a drag show, leaving the reader to think that if that is the road to anyone’s freedom, that freedom can begin there, it can begin anywhere. So talk to me about curating scenes from your life to make the individual points each of your scenes makes.

You’re a successful TV writer. You know how to deliver a moment fast and hot. Now I’m asking you to teach that a bit here, if you would. Let’s take on choosing that scene for that purpose, for planting the idea that freedom awaits those who inhabit themselves. I suspect you had a bunch of scenes to choose from, but you chose that dismal gay bar in the Deep South. So just talk to the writers listening a little bit about making those choices as we curate a scene from our life to make a certain point.

Jon: Well, first of all, the drag queen’s name was Ashley Outfit, and I was never going to forget that.

Marion: No, neither am I.

Jon: But as I started to think about that and tell my friends that story and laugh, at one point I started to think, Oh, my God, I sound like such an asshole, such a privileged asshole laughing at this drag queen. You know, we went to this—we were in the South, me and some friends. We were traveling around, and we saw this gay bar. We went in, and we happened upon this low-rent drag show, and we’re just like, you know, New York gays. And we just thought, of course, it’s just going to be funny. You know, let’s go in and have a few laughs at how—I mean, I knew fabulous drag queens in New York. I, at one point, lived in the building with RuPaul. I mean, we didn’t know each other, but we said hello. A drag queen in, I think it was Laurel, Mississippi, was not going to be a good drag queen. It was going to be—we were going to laugh. And at some point, I realized when I told that story that that’s kind of ugly, like these New Yorkers going down to laugh at the bad drag queens.

So—but I didn’t realize that at the time. I kind of got it, though, with how hard she struggled with that dove or pigeon or whatever kind of bird it was, because I don’t quite remember. But she worked so hard for like 10 or 12 people in that bar to lip-sync to “Wind Beneath My Wings.” I don’t want to think of how she did it, but she got a dove or a pigeon or something from the street. I hope she was kind to it, and released it when she sang “Fly, Fly Away,” or whatever the lyrics are to the end of that song. And that’s when it kind of hit me. I thought, she worked so hard. We were laughing at her bad Tammy Faye wig to ourselves. I mean, I don’t think we were that obvious about it, although maybe we were. Laughing into our dollar beers. And there was something about how she was so committed that I thought in that moment, I was like, I have respect for that person. Like, I’ve never had respect for anyone.

And the reason, to answer your question, that gave me a way to write about that story. Because I often find if I come in a little shallow and selfish, and I probably am, but I think I write myself a little bit more than that, because it’s a good journey to keep yourself, whether it’s in a story or a whole book or whatever, if it’s about you, if it’s a memoir, put yourself down to make yourself a little bit of an asshole so that you can have kind of a journey. So, I used that point when I realized years later what I could actually sound like to someone there, that I could use that as a way to show what a jerk I’ve been and then to show what a jerk I’m trying not to be afterwards.

Marion: Yeah.

Jon: So, on the other side of that, I now knew what the story was going to be about. Just to back up, the story until that point is about I’m secretly offended by drag, secretly. And I don’t want to admit that to my friends or myself, really, even, but then I see Ashley Outfit and with this pigeon slash dove, and she’s so committed and she’s so bad in a way that just makes me love her even more now. And on the other side of that, when I’m inspired by her, my character gets to go back to New York and bring this respect for drag, this newfound respect for drag, to the city and to his life, my life.

Marion: Yeah. And I think that this is part of the memoir writer’s assignment, that we look back on something that wasn’t about that at the time, but we push past that.

I mean, you and I have a shared experience in being sent to speech class when we were kids. I had a lisp, you did too. And in both our cases, it’s mostly gone, except for as a vehicle for story. And at first, and in the time it was happening, speech class might be only a walk of shame, as each week we’re called to go into our classes, we’re called out from the third grade class we’re sitting in, and sent down the hall to be humiliated further.

But this is the stuff of memoir, to go back and have a look, to figure out what the story is about. And I wonder, since I mentioned you’re a TV writer, you were a performer before that, now a successfully published author, I’d like to dig into what feeds what. You’ve been a TV writer, as I said, for “Will & Grace,” “Ugly Betty,” “Two Broke Girls,” all successful shows, all taking on aspects of identity and culture, but all funny. “Will & Grace” is one of the most successful TV shows with a principal gay character, “Ugly Betty.” The principal character struggles and succeeds to stay true to herself, and in “Two Broke Girls,” a shared dream propels those women on. So when you think about these strong themes, these are all strong themes that you also pursue in this fine memoir, did your experience in writing TV percolate up those themes, and those are the ones you wanted to write about? How does this work? What informed what, do you think, in terms of exploring the large themes of identity via your story?

Jon: Well, I think the TV writing experience informs this book, because I don’t think I’d, well, I wouldn’t have one without it, but it informs this book because it gave me the confidence, or even the fake kind of confidence, or confidence that I couldn’t quite hold on to, but enough that it allowed me to write a book and write about myself. I had been writing for characters on a lot of shows, “Ugly Betty,” “Two Broke Girls,” “Will & Grace,” the crazy ones, and I had always began to put myself in them, as writers do. I’m not the only one. I think that works for anyone writing on TV. Especially with the shows I worked on, like “Will & Grace,” I could put my voice into Will, I could put my voice into Jack, I could put my voice into Grace, because she could put someone down, and Karen, who wouldn’t want to write that?

So those shows helped me find what my voice was. I was so fortunate I was able to write on shows like that, and I think once you’re working on those shows, you can find other shows like that, and I began to develop my voice and what it was. And then I think at some point I began to think, and maybe it’s when there weren’t any jobs left, that I could find my own voice, because it was in all those characters, and I began to feel like, well, I’ve got one too. And I think in the end I was right. I found out who I was by working on those shows and what I could do. And it wasn’t easy. It was hard, probably because I’m my worst enemy and beating myself up a lot, and Trace and I, I remember early “Will & Grace” just always thinking, shutting our door in our office and wondering, are they going to fire us today? I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do this. And that’s probably a common thing with new writers on a show. But, yeah, they kind of taught me I have something to say to make this connection between the shows I was writing for and that because I was using my voice a lot, and with Tracy, working with Tracy, of course, and our voice, but my own, I wanted to use that voice and see if it could be mine, if I could write a book about me and have a specific point of view. And I think I did.

Marion: Yeah, I think you did too. I think it’s successfully done. And you wrote this in essay form, and each of the essays heightens and adds to your argument, each building out a platform for someone else to stand on. That’s what I love about this book mostly. It really is an invitation to come out, to come with, to come in. And it’s for anybody who is a little afraid, or very afraid, to inhabit their true selves. And the essays are fun. They’re instructive. They’re well-written. And there are also some deep, meaningful surprises, perhaps no one more surprising than your examination and value of sympathy, as delivered through your fandom of Helen Keller.

And here I always, when reading something that startles and delights me, I think about the pitch. I think about long before you pitch a story to anyone else, even if you’ve got as wonderful a writing partner as you do, you have to pitch the idea to yourself. And usually when we have what somebody else might call a crackpot idea, like fandom of Helen Keller, and discovering through that the value of sympathy, we talk ourselves out of it. We say, “Oh, that’s too crazy.” So, talk to me about pitching yourself first and foremost, or maybe you do pitch to your writing partner, but talk about pitching yourself these ideas and whether or not you’ve ever talked yourself out of one that you regret talking yourself out of.

Jon: You know, you write ugly. I would just write ugly stuff and not edit. And if it’s a memoir in particular, because that’s kind of, I guess, what I know at this point, I didn’t want to edit anything out. Yes, I did worry about this thing with Helen Keller. My friend Ryan O’Connell in the forward even calls me out on it. He didn’t call me out, but he kind of makes a joke about my fetishizing people with handicaps and people who are differently abled and he has CP. And so he found that funny. So I thought, Oh, okay, well, you know, I can get away with it too. Was there something I talked myself out of? Well, I wanted to talk about Anne Frank and I don’t even think I can say on this podcast what I was going to do, what I was going to write. It’s very dark and I wouldn’t, and I talked myself out of that or it wasn’t even easy to, it wasn’t hard to talk myself out of it. I just said, I’m not talking about Anne Frank in a comic way. I cannot do that. I love her. I worship her. When I was a kid, I had those diaries, but you know, I’d approach everything with a dark sense of humor. I had to not write about her at all, really, because I would have said something dark and comedic and maybe not everyone knows that respect and love can still go with that. You know, it’s our comedy, maybe people do that, but some people will be offended and she’s a child. She was a child. So yeah.

Marion: Sounds like a good decision. Yeah, that sounds like a really good decision. And I find it very interesting that we get these ideas and sometimes we say, Oh my God, Mary, that’s so insane. You can’t do that. Or appropriately, you can’t bring heart humor, even dark humor to the Anne Frank story. And it’s a good thing to have on you, this conscientiousness, I guess.

Jon: It helps to have someone tell you, you don’t always know when you’re going too far. And there was an example I have on “Will & Grace,” and I think of this and it’s so awful that we tried to do this, but we were on that show, the writers would just have fun pushing and pushing the envelope and pushing it. Most of the time, you know, and if you look at them now, they’re kind of racist. We always thought, you know, we gave as good as we got, we fought, but we were a room full of white writers, mostly, I think. Sometimes we were. And, you know, they raise eyebrows now, those episodes.

But I remember one thing we pitched for Karen, she was talking about, Jack asked her, I think, about she was ready to date, or something, and what’s your perfect man. And because she’s Karen, we thought we’d get away with a lot. I think she said something like “handsome, a sense of humor, kind, loves animals and preferably white.” And that in the room had made us like laugh because it’s so dark and awful. We thought Karen can get away with it. She couldn’t get away with it. The audience like kind of, not only did they not laugh, they kind of, you could hear them kind of breathe in and it was like, oh, we discovered that we went too far. Even though it’s kind of, you know, could be funny, considered funny in a dark, horrible way.

But yes, my point is, it helps if you learn from other people how far you’ve gotten. So somebody has to read it to say, I think that’s a little too much there. I didn’t know how to edit myself when it came to the personal things. I’d be curious, I am curious to hear what your listeners would think about writing these such personal stuff about themselves. And I don’t mean like humiliations and things, but sex and intimate feelings and prostituting yourself literally. And I didn’t have anyone say, “That’s going too far.” I kind of just gave myself permission to go really, really far with it and trust myself. And now I’m a little bit like, the book has just come out and I’m a little bit like, I don’t know. My family might read it and they probably won’t, but I hope they don’t.

Marion: Ah, family. Well, I think it begs the question of what we’re asking a memoir writer to do. And whenever I have a memoir writer on, I always ask that, what are we asking you to do when we ask you to go back and cover trauma? Are we asking you to re-inhabit it, relive it, recreate it, or merely stand by coolly and report on it? So what do you think? What was your assignment when you set out to write memoir?

Jon: Fortunately, I was writing a comedy, so I’m able to comment on it in a funny way. I wouldn’t envy someone who was writing a dramatic memoir or not a comic memoir, I should say, and did have to relive a trauma.

I think it’s easier to relive it if you can make fun of it, of course. So I think I had that in my favor, but it has opened up old wounds. But it’s also brought good stuff too, because with social media now, and people reading it, and they can quickly, they write back to you. Like I had this woman write back that she remembered, oh, I can’t remember the name I give the character in the book, but there’s a blind woman in our high school that she became blind, this girl. From one year to the next, suddenly she was blind because of a brain tumor. And I felt terrible about myself for how I treated her, just terrible. But again, I wanted to put that out there and I put comedy around it. But my friend Catherine from school remembered that. She got in touch with me and we talked a little bit about this poor girl and her life. It was nice to know that someone else kind of shared a similar trauma, that I wouldn’t have known that if I didn’t put it in my book, that Catherine wouldn’t have known to message me about it and talk to me about similar things that happened with her and what it was like at such a young age to have that happen to a friend and not know how to act.

And I would love to talk to that girl, woman now, whose name I don’t, I know her name, but I don’t know what I called her in the book, but I would love to have a conversation with her about what she thought of the whole thing. But it was revisiting a horrible thing for me. Most of mine were horrible traumas that were often created by me, which also can make some funny. You can find a funny spin if you’ve created, if it’s something that’s horrible has happened to you. Yeah. I don’t know that you could, but you know what? I take that back. I think there’s comedy in almost everything, maybe not in Anne Frank, but almost everything.

Marion: Yeah. Not in Anne Frank, but maybe almost everything. And turning that comedy writer’s eye on yourself. Was that easy? Hard? Somewhere in between?

Jon: Oh, that was easy. I, you know, when you’re me, I always made fun of myself and I did a podcast for someone and I can’t remember what or who, and even if I did, I don’t know if I’d say it, but my publicist listened to it and she got back to me and she was like, “Stop trashing yourself and trashing the book.”

Marion: My God. I bet your publicist started on you about that. Yeah. I would imagine that’s her job. Yeah.

Jon: I didn’t think I did that at all, but it was so easy to trash the book and I didn’t know and myself and I’m an idiot and I don’t know, I wrote this stupid book. It was kind of eye opening when she said that.

Marion: Yeah. Don’t trash it. It’s got a message of right now. So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about writing into now. Books are being banned, taken off the shelves. Themes of identity and queerness are being targeted. You are very good and they’re not the only themes that are being targeted. Everything is being targeted from the indigenous to everything having to do with the BIPOC community.

Jon: The Smithsonian.

Marion: Yes. Specifically books that have to do with identity. And you’re very good at speaking to those who are currently self-hating and in need of the encouragement to inhabit themselves. But some of those people who are scared to be themselves are also scared to write from their true selves. So speak to them. What do you say to those who want to write into the spaces that are now under attack?

Jon: Well, they have to do it anyway.

They don’t have to think of where it’s going to end up, or if it’s going to be banned, or if it’s even going to be published. I think we’ve got to keep writing, and now more than ever, if you want to write something and you feel like you can, write it down. Start writing it. Keep a diary. Because those diary entries could be turned into something else. We need that history. We can’t lose it.

Even if it’s like your day went this way or your day went that way or somebody called you something on the street, our history will be disappearing. As you said, taking books off the shelves? They’re going to burn them probably next if they haven’t already. That’s just another attempt to erase our history. So we have to write and write quickly to keep all that history going. We can’t forget it.

It reminds me, when I started to write this book, when I was told I needed a theme or something, I thought I’m going to write about, it was just about this, kind of the theme that is in the book, but also what we’re talking about, that people forget their history because it has constantly been erased for the LGBTQ and others. I started with a bigger idea of, I’m going to talk about big things in history that LGBTQ people don’t remember, like the Buggery Act of 1533, and find other, maybe comic, but real things that happened, and James Buchanan, the bachelor president, and other things in history that I know will be forgotten if they haven’t. You can find access to them, but you’d have to know you’re looking for something.

But then I kind of realized I rather enjoyed talking about myself more. So it went from protecting history, historical events, and not ones you’ve seen, not ones that have been written extensively about, but ones you never heard of, and kind of getting them down as a way of remembering them. It was kind of lofty, but I would also make it a comic thing. So it didn’t feel that lofty to me. Like I said, I decided to just make it about myself and my little history things, television shows and stuff like that. Oh God, it’s so important that we remember the past, our past, but also the past. I mean, are those one day just going to be stories told verbally by our elders around a campfire? I don’t know.

I mean, anyone listening, if you’ve got stories you want to write or stories you could tell, find a way to do it. There are reading, write a story and Google your area, see if there’s anywhere or outside your area, see if there’s anywhere that does a reading series and get up and read a story you’ve written about your life, about anything you want. Don’t be erased and don’t worry about being bad. Just get up, make it short. So if it is bad, you won’t be up there very long, but no, the next time, the next time it won’t be as bad and make sure there is a next time.

But oh my God.

Marion: Great advice.

Jon: It’s great advice. It’s really scary. And you’re scaring me just by bringing it up even more that how things could be lost.

Marion: Yeah. Well, you fought back. It’s a book that will get people, yeah, it’ll get people thinking about how to inhabit themselves. And I’m so grateful that you wrote it, and I’m so grateful that you came here, agreed to come here today and talk about it. Thank you so much, Jon. The book is a delight. So are you. And thank you. It’s a wonder. Thank you so much.

Jon: Oh, you’re welcome.

Marion: The author is Jon Kinnally, author of the debut memoir, I’m Prancing As Fast As I Can:  My Journey From Self-Loathing Closet Case to a Successful TV Writer With Some Self-Esteem just out from Permuted pPress. Get it wherever books are sold. See more on the author and his upcoming live appearances at john kinnally dot com. I’m Marion Roach-Smith and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwertyy is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jaqueline 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 on 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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