I am excited to share the thought-provoking conversation I had with Rebecca Woolf, author of All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire. We talked about the return to long-form blogging on Substack, the question of boundaries and secrets and shame when writing memoir, and reinventing story structure through a female lens. This woman needs to do a TEDTalk!
Rebecca will be signing books at the grand opening of Zibby's Bookshop on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica the weekend of February 18th & 19th. Come on down to check it out and meet some other local authors including Leslie Lehr, Terri Cheney, Hope Edelman, Claire Bidwell Smith, Annabelle Gurwitch, among others, including Zibby Owens herself!
REBECCA WOOLF has worked as a freelance writer since age 16 when she became a leading contributor to the hit 90s book series, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.
Since then, she has contributed to numerous publications, websites and anthologies, most notably her own award-winning personal blog, Girl’s Gone Child, which attracted millions of unique visitors worldwide.
She has appeared on CNN and NPR and has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine and New York Mag.
She lives in Los Angeles with her son and three daughters.
After years of struggling in a tumultuous marriage, Rebecca Woolf was finally ready to leave her husband. Two weeks after telling him she wanted a divorce, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Four months later, at the age of 44, he died.
In her memoir All of This, she chronicles the months before her husband’s death—and her rebirth after he was gone. With rigorous honesty and incredible awareness, she reflects on the end of her marriage: how her husband’s illness finally gave her the space to make peace with his humanity and her own.
KARIN GUTMAN: You began writing as a blogger and now you’re on Substack. What do you think of this relatively new platform for writers?
REBECCA WOOLF: I just posted my first post this morning, and I had this feeling of, Oh my God, am I going to do this again? So many mixed feelings. It's a really interesting moment to talk about memoir because I’ve been doing it all my life, obviously, but I'm going back to my roots of blogging.
KARIN: All of the people I’m following on Substack were original bloggers.
REBECCA: I think there's a return. We're seeing the social media platforms implode and realizing that our content doesn't belong to us when it's on other websites. It's different when it's in your own space, and I think it's brilliant.
KARIN: What was it like when you were first starting out?
REBECCA: I started writing memoir in my teens. I wrote for a book series called Chicken Soup for the Soul, which was a very big in the 90s. I wrote for The Teenage Soul. I submitted a story in middle school. It was published and then they had me submit more pieces. I was writing about my personal life, so all my heartbreaks ended up in books. Everything that's ever happened to me that's been painful has been written about and publicly displayed for my whole life.
KARIN: What have you learned about boundaries, if anything?
REBECCA: My job is a litmus test for the people who are and aren't in my life anymore. When your job is to write about your personal life, you are a liability to the people who love you. There are people who have been with me for their whole lives, and my kids are very used to it, but yeah, that's definitely a question. It's like, where are the boundaries?
But that's how I started, as a blogger in 2001. I didn't go to college. I went straight to work for The Teenage Soul series at 18. I wrote, edited, and ghost wrote pretty much the entirety of three different books. It was just me under 15 different names.
KARIN: Wow, really?
REBECCA: They needed content and they didn't want it to seem like it was one person writing a whole book. Those books, by the way, make 10s of millions of dollars and contributors made $200. It was my job to go through submissions for years, and basically my boss ended up saying, I like the way you write better. So, I would just write stuff under different names. I had a whole series of a teenage boy and a teenage girl writing back and forth to each other, and I was both of them. I was writing about my personal stories under my name. That was nonfiction. But I was writing under pseudonyms about other issues. And that was fiction.
KARIN: How did your writing career evolve from there?
REBECCA: I started my blog Girl’s Gone Child in 2005, a few months after my son was born. I got pregnant unexpectedly at 23 with a person that I barely knew, married in Vegas, and suddenly went from being this single partying, traveling person to a married mother with a child in Los Angeles. None of my friends were nowhere near having kids.
I started my blog as a way of hopefully finding my people, or if not, just talking about my experience. Anytime I feel alone or isolated or like there's nobody who understands me, I write about it, because when you do that you actually find people who do. That's always been my bat signal to the world—writing about my discomfort or loneliness.
Shame keeps a lot of people from writing. One of my first stories was called I Kiss Like A Horse, which I wrote for Chicken Soup based on the fact this boy who I had kissed in 10th grade told everyone that I kissed like a horse. Not only did that rumor mortify me as a 14 or 15-year-old, but what I did was, I wrote an entire essay about it that was published in 15 different languages worldwide. So, I took a moment that would have otherwise been mortifying, and I said to myself, This makes me feel like shit, which means it's going to help someone else. That has been the heart of my work my whole life.
KARIN: What a great way to deal with shame. What was your angle?
REBECCA: It lands with this acceptance of having no control over what people say about me. I know who I am. And if I kiss like a horse, I'm going to wear it with pride.
KARIN: What was it like being a blogger in the early 2000s?
REBECCA: The internet was very punk rock at that time. It felt like you were making an online zine. We all did our own HTML. There was no such thing as algorithms. We embedded videos that we took on our digital cameras, that we edited ourselves. It was very DIY, so growing an audience felt really organic.
I was fortunate to be one of the first mommy bloggers and amassed a pretty large audience pretty quickly. From there, I got a book deal and launched Babel, which was a big parenting site in the mid to late aughts. They launched with three bloggers, and I was one of them. I was at the forefront of all the parenting writing spaces, so I was doing work for any parenting site that launched. If it wasn't contributing as a columnist or an essayist, it was consulting.
The ad guys realized there was a lot of money to be made from the mommy bloggers. I started making really good money.
KARIN: How did that work exactly?
REBECCA: It started with banner ads, and then it went to sponsored posts. You would get, say, a retainer with Target.
KARIN: Were you transparent with your audience?
REBECCA: In those days, everyone was. I don't think people are as transparent as they used to be. It was a big deal. You had to put on top of every post, “This is sponsored by Graco,” or whatever.
KARIN: How did you manage working while raising four kids?
REBECCA: Yeah, I had help. I had a nanny when my twins were little for the first few years. With my other kids, it was basically just me at home with a kid on my lap, figuring it out. I had sitters coming here and there when I needed them. I was super transparent about that, too. I think it was far more transparent those days than it is now. I don't think people talk about that.
KARIN: What was the turning point?
REBECCA: The money dried up, because the money started going to influencers. I'm not going to do Tik Tok videos. No dig on people who do that, it’s just, I was a writer.
I don't know a single person who was blogging long-form in the early aughts, who turned into an influencer of any kind. Nobody.
That's why Substack is exciting, because it's a return to the original space, which was writers writing and people reading our work because we were good writers. We weren't just writing pithy captions. It was really about storytelling and transparency and being honest about experiences. Not this hyper glossy, super filtered stuff.
On Substack I can charge people. It's $7 a month. I will publish some for free, but I'm going to publish anything that's explicit or super personal behind a paywall. You can't comment unless you are subscribed. That feels good to me. I’ve subscribed to a bunch of writers and I pay for all of the ones I subscribed to because I want to support people.
The return to these longer-form platforms is exciting because it means the work is going to start to speak for itself, and it's not about where you're publishing or how many followers you have, this bullshit that everyone's trying to sell you.
This Twitter thing is so interesting to me. It's like watching this thing fall—the hubris of male mediocrity who somehow became empowered. It's like eating popcorn.
KARIN: Let’s talk about your memoir All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire. I find your voice and writing style so accessible. I really enjoy the way you move back and forth, in time and place, with digestible pieces that are seamlessly woven.
REBECCA: Thank you.
KARIN: How did you figure that out?
REBECCA: The name of my Substack is “The Braid,” which was the way I looked at this book. I didn’t know this, but traditional story structure is based on a male orgasm. The climax and the resolution are huge.
It broke open my brain because that’s every story I've ever read. It’s the structure that I've been taught. My whole life is based on that shit, and of course I can't write my book like that. That's not how how I cum. I just kind of fall asleep.
So, I had this epiphany about my own desire, my own body, and storytelling as a woman. How was I going to tell a story as a woman? What would my format look like? There isn't a climax and a resolution. That is not how my life looks. Is that honest? Whenever something happens, we're looking for the resolution. We're looking for the ‘aha’ moment. We're trying to find this device that, by the way, was created by some dude who said, This is is how I orgasm.
I remember my editor coming back and saying, I think this is your ending. I said, No, I don't think so. In fact, the first draft had three different endings like Choose Your Own Adventure—this idea that there are multiple climaxes and that just because I have one doesn't mean I'm done. I'm like, Wait, I can have another one, like I can still go, I'm not tired yet. That to me felt accurate to my experience, as a person, as a woman, as a sexual being at this point in my life. I'm not here for one ending. I'm not here for one climax. I'm here for all of them.
So, I had this come to Jesus moment about how I was going to format my book. What I kept coming back to was the braid—what the braid looked like and what it represented for me.
The story that I wanted to tell does have three parts—the beginning, middle and end—that's legit. There are three parts, but they overlap with each other. The end is its own thing, too. It's the loose hairs of the braid that fall down the back.
It's a memoir. I don't know how you tie up loose ends. There is no end. You're still here, life is still happening. So, this idea of having to punctuate your ending feels really false. I'm really aware of endings and making sure that they're open and loose. That to me feels authentic.
KARIN: I’m a fan of the braided structure and weaving the different story threads.
REBECCA: I don't know if you've read Carmen Maria Machado. If you haven't, she's an incredible writer who wrote the memoir In the Dream House. I highly recommend it because you've never read anything like it. It’s basically told in little vignettes.
It feels like you're going through drawers, opening them up and seeing what's inside and closing them. I realized how rare it is to pick up a book and to recognize that its format is something you've never felt before—to be inspired not only by what you're reading but also by the way it's formatted. It's like, Oh my god, I can write a book like this. We get so bogged down by rules, and when you read someone who's breaking them all and killing it, it feels really exciting.
KARIN: What was your writing process like?
REBECCA: My process was super messy. I probably wrote the bulk of this book on my kitchen floor and on my notes app. I don't know what it is about the kitchen floor. I pretty much wrote it all in real time.
My book is about when my husband was diagnosed with stage four cancer, right after I told him that I wanted to divorce. He died four months later. So, I spent four months taking care of a man that I wanted to leave, and when he died, I felt a lot of conflicting feelings including relief because I was miserable in my marriage. But as a widow, I felt like I couldn't talk openly about that. I felt guilty for even feeling those things.
When I started this book, I basically went through my notes app and emailed myself every single one and put it all in a document. There were a lot of fragments, and I was trying to put together a mosaic based on all these little pieces. It was as if I had written hundreds of short essays.
The first draft of this book was twice as long as the published version. When I turned my book in to my editor, it read 800 pages. 110,000 words. She responded with, Your contract is for 65,000 words. I turned in a book that literally needed to be cut in half. I remember talking to her on the phone. I was in the parking lot at Trader Joe's and just burst into tears, because I was like, Oh my god, how the fuck am I going to cut this in half? I did cut half of it. I really stand by what remains, because I basically had to Sophie's Choice my whole book.
I'm glad that I didn't read the contract, because I think it made me a better writer. I think that so much of writing is editing.
KARIN: How did people in your life react to your book?
REBECCA: When you have people in your life that love you and support you unconditionally, you can write about anything. If you're writing a memoir, you are going to hurt people, but it is not on you to protect them from your truth.
I recently had another epiphany about the locked diary. Who does the locked diary protect? I grew up in the 80s as a small child and every one of my friends was given locked diaries—all the girls. My brother never got a locked diary. At the time it was like, yeah, you lock the diary. Keep your secrets safe.
I'm wondering more and more about this idea of secrecy. Who are we protecting? Who are we keeping safe?
I don't write to protect people from my truth. If you have a problem with it, if it's upsetting to you, or if you don't agree with me, that's not my problem. I've spent a lot of years protecting people, mainly men, and I don't need to do that anymore.
You have to be not only prepared but also welcoming to every feeling, from every person, and validating all of it. I have reached out to everyone in my family—they knew I was writing this book—saying, I understand if this is going to be hard for you. If you don't want to talk to me, if you feel uncomfortable, I validate your feelings. I love you. I have to write this book.
Allowing people to react negatively and giving them the space to do that and have those feelings is really important, because they're entitled to their feelings as much as you're entitled to your truth. They're entitled to the reaction to your work as much as you're entitled to doing the work.
KARIN: I noticed that you use the royal “we” in your writing, as if including the reader in your experience. Are you aware of that?
REBECCA: I've been writing for 20 years, and a lot of the people who were with me 20 years ago still are, and we're still having these conversations behind the scenes. The “we” feels inclusive to those who aren't able to articulate their stories or don't feel like they can talk openly about their experiences. I feel like I'm speaking for them.
Through writing this book, I found out a huge secret about two very close women in my family. Both of them shared these major, life-changing secrets with me, and I realized, Oh, I carry their stories in my body. I come from these women, they're in my body.
So much of my willingness to write about what I wrote about was informed by the fact that I was carrying the secrets of these women in my body and that they trusted me with those secrets. As much as I was writing for me, I was writing for them too. I'm not trying to sound like a martyr hero, it's just that when we are sitting down to write our truth, we're not just writing it for us. Otherwise we would be writing it in our notebook and not sharing it with anybody. There's something in us that recognizes that our story is going to be relatable and helpful. A love letter to somebody else.
So I think the “we” is acknowledging that there are people on the other side of your work who are going to see you and feel seen by what you're saying. So much of memoir writing is this gift to some relationship, like you're sharing yourself with someone and it does feel like a “we” to me.
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To learn more about Rebecca Woolf visit her site.
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