A Conversation with Rebecca Woolf

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.



Buy the book

To learn more about Rebecca Woolf visit her site.

See all interviews

A Conversation with Terri Cheney

As the pandemic surges in Los Angeles and across the United States, I am finding it's more important than ever to find ways to bolster my self-care. For me that's deepening my journaling practice, taking long walks by the beach, and staying connected with friends.

I had the opportunity to speak at length with author Terri Cheney, who is a mental health advocate. Her new book Modern Madness dives deeply into the complexities of mental illness and breaks it down in a way that is accessible, seeing it more clearly by unpacking the myths and realities. When I asked her what is most misunderstood about mental illness, she said, "how common it is." It may be challenging to release a book during COVID, but for Terri, the timing couldn't be better. It is not just for readers with a diagnosis but for anyone who is trying to better understand this issue and what we can do about it.

---

Credit: Tracy Nguyen.

Terri Cheney is the author of the New York Times bestseller Manic: A Memoir. Terri's writings and commentary about bipolar disorder have also been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, NPR, and countless articles and popular blogs, including her own ongoing blog for Psychology Today, which has over one million views.

Her new book, Modern Madness, exposes the complexities of the mental health issues currently confronting our nation. Using the familiar framework of an owner’s manual, Modern Madness brilliantly imposes order on a frightening and forbidding topic. Cheney’s juxtaposition of conventional clinical language with real, lived experience unpacks the myths and realities of mental illness.

Read People Magazine's feature story about Terri and her new book.

KARIN GUTMAN: You wrote about your experience with bipolar disorder in your first two books. How is this new book, Modern Madness, different?

TERRI CHENEY: This book is different because the first two were really strictly memoir. I wanted to take this beyond the confines of memoir because since Manic became a best seller, I have heard so many stories and met so many people and am much more aware of myself as being a member of a community of the mentally ill. So I really wanted to reach out beyond me for a change and incorporate family and loved ones of people with mental illness, really see if I could bring them into the conversation more. So it is my story but it's also lessons learned. I think this is the big difference.

We actually have to come up with a new genre to market it, because it's on the edge… it is memoir, but it's also somewhat prescriptive. So my agent and I ended up calling it prescriptive memoir and that seemed to work out okay.

KARIN: What about self-help memoir?

TERRI: I didn't want it to be self-help, it's not what it is. It's memoir. I mean, it's all my story.

KARIN: What’s the difference between prescriptive and self-help memoir?

TERRI: Well, I think prescriptive bounces more heavily into memoir. This is not an advice book. I actually have a story in here where I rail against advice. I think it shuts people down and it turns them off. I have a story in here about saying, “Tell me where it hurts.” Sit down with someone who's struggling and just say, “Tell me where it hurts.”

Five little words that just make a world of difference, rather than telling them what to do, how to do... get more exercise, eat more blueberries, that kind of thing.

It's so hard to be told what to do when you're depressed, because you can barely move or breathe. Being told to take a shower or exercise is almost a slap in the face.

KARIN: When you wrote Manic, weren’t you originally intending to educate your audience? Until you realized, “This is just not working.”

TERRI: That is neat to remember that.

KARIN: That really stuck with me.

TERRI: I was in the hospital at the time and did tons of research when on grand rounds with the doctors. I immersed myself in the science and the clinical aspect of it and was so bored. I just couldn't get into it. When I was trying to write, I just didn't feel that tug, that I need to tell this. I don't know if I was narcissistic or what it was, but my own story was really fascinating to me, and just wanted to be told. So I threw away everything, all the research. I mean, I still have it, but I did a total about face and dove into myself and my own story, my own experience, my feelings, what it felt like inside my body to have bipolar disorder.

To be where I had been as an entertainment lawyer and then to turn into a writer on mental health issues was not where I saw my life going until I wrote the book.

KARIN: Do you think Modern Madness is maybe a different version of the original intention you had with Manic?

TERRI: It could be that it's more expansive than Manic was. It's more all-encompassing and it does have the introductory sections describing for example what depression is or what mania is. It does have that clinical element that I had thrown away. So the research was not useless. It came in very handy to know all that. Never throw away research.

KARIN: Does the book focus on bipolar disorder or is it broader?

TERRI: Much broader. My stories are necessarily partly bipolar, but also as I said, they are part of the mental health community and the mentally ill. So, this definitely reaches beyond just bipolar.

KARIN: How are you doing today?

TERRI: I'm doing great. I waited for the other shoe to drop with COVID because isolation is one of the things I talk about in the book as being a bad coping skill. Isolation is very bad for you when you're depressed or have a mental health issue. But I've done great during COVID.

KARIN: Why do you think that is?

TERRI: First of all, because I'm used to being alone. I'm not married, I'm a writer. I'm used to feeling separate as a writer and as someone with mental illness. I think there is a separateness that is inherent in that. You watch a lot when you're a writer and you stand outside. So isolation kind of comes naturally. It's almost as if I've been practicing for COVID. I'm trained for it.

KARIN: Wow.

TERRI: Yeah. I'm quite surprised.

KARIN: Do you take medication for your illness?

TERRI: Yes, I've been a proponent of medication from the beginning. I've been on every medication there is practically. For me to accept having bipolar disorder, I had to have a story around it. My story is that it's chemically based or it has something to do with physicality, whether it's caused by inflammation (that's a recent theory) or by a chemical imbalance in the brain. That is easier for me to accept and then treat with medications. So, I've always believed that medication is necessary.

KARIN: I recall you sharing that you enjoy the experience of hypomania. Does the medication interfere with that?

TERRI: Kay Jamison writes a lot about this, about not wanting to take lithium because it would dull her writing ability. I certainly love hypomania, it is the best part of being bipolar. You feel so on top of your game and everything connects, everything clicks. The words just come pouring out of you. But the consequences of not taking medication are so great that it's just not worth it. The trade-off is just not worth it because the reactions are so bad. I'm one of those few people who is totally medication compliant.

KARIN: With three books under your belt, what have you learned about the creative writing process, about how to birth a book. Is there anything that is consistent?

TERRI: Yes. I've learned that you can't wait for inspiration to strike. That's been a huge lesson. I struggled for seven years to write Manic because I would just sort of sit there with my pen waiting for the metaphor to come, and trying to force the damn metaphor. And it just doesn't happen that way. You have to put yourself in a place to write and then write something—anything—so you have what I call playdough. Clay that you can sculpt. Because then the next day when you have to face the writing process, you're not facing an empty page, you're playing with words. And playing with words is great, I love doing that. I don't like the blank page.

KARIN: Many writers I work with struggle with finding the structure of their book.

TERRI: I've learned that I am not very good with structure, it's my bête noire. I work better with a short form format—the essay—than I do with a long form. So, in Manic and in Modern Madness I use the essay form to create a book with a narrative thread.

I tried to turn it to my advantage, because I know I have trouble with plotting a long chronological narrative. It's one thing I work at really hard, but I think some people are gifted in it and some people aren't. And I don't feel like I'm particularly gifted that way. I can see the arc of a short story very clearly, I feel it, but I don't feel the long ones.

KARIN: What about your second book, The Dark Side of Innocence?

TERRI: That one was more chronological. I don't think it worked as well. It told the story of my childhood. In a way, it was the idea of my editor to write about my childhood and I didn't have very strong feelings about it at the time. I sort of wish I had held back and waited for something that really felt more like it needed to be written the way that Manic and Modern Madness felt. These are stories that I've seriously wanted to tell and get out there.

KARIN: What was the urgency around this book? What were the stories you wanted to tell?

TERRI: I felt very strongly about incorporating relationship stories into a book because I was too wrapped up in my illness for too many years to see how it affected the people around me. I had watched how it affected men that I dated, friends that I had, my family. I had a little more perspective after all these years, and I felt very strongly that relationships were unexplored in my earlier work because it was mostly just about me.

KARIN: How does your mental illness affect or inform your creative process? Or is it hard to have perspective on it?

TERRI: No, I can see it. I can see it with some clarity. When I'm depressed I can't and don't write and that's something I've learned. It's been a really difficult lesson to learn, that there are simply times when I can't write and I have self-compassion for that, because you feel rotten when you don't write when you're a writer. You feel like you just haven't gotten anything done and you're just all clammy and stuck. I hate that feeling. And when I'm depressed I just don't have the inspiration or the desire really to tackle the words, so I let myself have those days off.

I try to make up for it when I'm in better places. I try to take advantage of the hypomanic moods. There's also normalcy in bipolar disorder. You have periods where you're just like everybody else, when you're not going through a mood state.

So I write as much as I can. When I’m manic I try to write because I think I've got the world's greatest ideas and I'm going to change the universe with them. I see the fabric of the universe, but unfortunately I write very badly when I'm manic. I write almost illegible to begin with, I like to do it in longhand.

KARIN: Do those episodes still happen even on medication?

TERRI: Not as much as they used to. I don't get as high and I don't get quite as low. I still get depressive episodes unfortunately, but they're fewer and for the most part they don't get as suicidal. So that's huge.

KARIN: How long do those depressive episodes typically last?

TERRI: I'm a rapid cycler. It's sort of a curse and a blessing because my episodes are very short, like four days depression followed by three days of mania. So the good part of that is that I know people who have episodes that last for months and I cannot imagine being severely depressed for months or years. But the problem is, it's very hard to treat because you're always chasing the symptoms. They're changing constantly. I think I write in Modern Madness, it's like chasing a comet's tail to try to get the last symptom that you had and medicate that, but then you're on to the next one.

KARIN: How much time typically passes in between?

TERRI: It varies. It can be weeks, months, generally weeks. I'm very aware of my moods and I don't know if that's because I'm bipolar and I've educated myself about it, or because I'm a writer. I'm just hyperaware of my emotions and my moods. I'm always thinking of it as material.

So it really does inform the universe for me. There's this big controversy that's saying, “I am bipolar” versus “I have bipolar disorder.” I get yelled at a lot by people for saying “I am bipolar,” which is part of the way I see the world. It's part of my mindset. It affects everything, so it doesn't feel weird to me to say that. But I understand it's not your whole identity. There are other parts of me.

KARIN: Since you’re so comfortable exposing yourself, is there any part of you that gets nervous to release your work into the world?

TERRI: I have a perfect example of that. I had this big lecture last night in front of 250 people, and it's on Zoom and I had to read a story from Modern Madness. I chose one that has me wondering where my panties went after an illicit interlude. And I'm thinking as I'm reading this, “There are doctors in this audience, there are people I know... what am I doing? Are you crazy?” And yet there's a certain thrill about doing it. Because there's a power to self-exposure as long as it's not too graphic and doesn't make people too uncomfortable. There's a great power to it. I spent so many years, as you know, hiding out and not telling anyone about my illness and just literally hiding under my desk when I was depressed as a lawyer. Lying all the time, pretending that something else was wrong with me and I couldn't go out because I had the flu or whatever. I would get so tired of the lies that telling the truth and being honest about what's going on can never feel as bad, I think, for me as it might feel for other people. I know how sick that made me to be lying all the time.

KARIN: Also, you have tended to expose yourself versus other people.

TERRI: Right. I worried about exposing my family when I wrote my second book. I was very careful with that. Both my parents are dead now, so I don't have to worry about that now and I probably have more to write about them. But exposing yourself... I feel like you're fair game. Who is the famous writing teacher who wrote, “If people want you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better”?

KARIN: Anne Lamott.

TERRI: I love that. That has encouraged me many times.

KARIN: Has anything ever come back to bite you?

TERRI: I've tried not to make people too recognizable, but people that are recognizable have been absolutely thrilled to be in the book. I have an ex-boyfriend who does not come off very well. He brags about it all the time. He said to me, “I'd marry you in a minute if it weren't for your bipolar disorder.” I wrote that in Manic and I think that's a pretty damning statement. He joked about it all the time and loves that he was a character in the book. So that's been my experience. I know other people have had problems but I've been very lucky. And I don't let people read my writing before it goes out. I think that's a dangerous habit.

After years of working for other people, if I'm going to make the self-sacrifice to be a writer, I want to have the perks of it as well. And part of that is being able to say what you want. You're the writer. You live or die by your words.

KARIN: I love that.

TERRI: Yeah.

I miss the money of being a lawyer. Writing is so hard financially.

KARIN: Do you miss practicing law at all?

TERRI: Well pretty much money is the only part. There is a certain instant credibility that went with being a lawyer that I miss, that business card moment when people, men especially, started to take you very seriously all of a sudden. When you say you're a writer there's that pause, that uncomfortable pause like, oh, another one.

KARIN: Even though you're published?

TERRI: Well now I get to say what I've written. Then I get to do my killer line, “And I wrote a book that became a best seller.” That's great. I mean I'm so lucky. I just love being able to say that, because I never in a million years expected that would happen.

KARIN: Why do you think it hit so strongly? What were the forces behind that?

TERRI: I think one of the big things, just from a marketing standpoint, was that my Modern Love essay for the New York Times hit a week before Manic was due to come out. And it was a powerful essay. It got filmed and Anne Hathaway ended up playing me which was such a bizarre turn of events. But that really helped, getting that exposure in the New York Times was tremendous.

KARIN: Was the timing just by chance?

TERRI: Just fortuitous. Yeah.

The same way that Modern Madness has come out in the middle of a pandemic when everybody is struggling with their mental health. I mean, I've been lucky. And I certainly didn't time it that way, and I didn't realize the title would be so prescient.

KARIN: Who is Modern Madness for?

TERRI: Pretty much everybody, because I think one thing I've learned is that when I tell people I'm bipolar there's this... it's not even six degrees of separation. It's, “So am I” or ”my best friend is” or somebody I work with, or I have depression, I have anxiety. That really has surprised me how many people are affected by mental illness. And if you don't have it yourself, you love someone who does.

So when I was writing my proposal for the book, I realized if this goes out, this could be marketed to almost anybody. It's not just for those with a diagnosis.

KARIN: What do you think is most misunderstood about mental illness?

TERRI: How common it is. One in five Americans takes a psychiatric medication, and the suicide rate, even before COVID, has just been skyrocketing. There's one suicide in the world every 40 seconds. It's tremendous what's happening and I don't really understand why, particularly with young people, it's so prevalent. I think it's being talked about more, thank God.

KARIN: Why do you think it’s so prevalent?

TERRI: I think it's easy to say social media is contributing to it. When I look at the people, I don't read my comments anymore, although I hope everybody will leave me an Amazon review! I really try not to read anonymous comments anymore because they were so brutal.

I had one person say, “Terri Cheney writes about suicide so much, I wish she would just go ahead and do it already.” If you read something like that you're like, “Do they not think I'm a human being?” So that sort of cured me for a while. That was for an article I wrote in The Huffington Post.

KARIN: What is your life like now? How do you spend your days?

TERRI: Well, now that I don't go to the cafe anymore to write, I try to set aside time for productivity every day which I am trying to be kind to myself about. Right now I've been dealing so much with publicity. That's been the last few months. But I've started to plot my new book. You have to really be kind to yourself when you're a writer because it's so easy to find fault with not doing enough. There's always that feeling of “I didn't do enough today.” But I think any day that you face the page or you face the project is a day well spent. Because your brain is percolating, I call it.

KARIN: But don't you find a lot of the writing, or the ideas, come when you're not facing the page, too?

TERRI: Absolutely, yeah.

KARIN: So how do you balance that?

TERRI: I write down all my ideas because I have a terrible memory. And it's just getting worse. So I have post-it notes everywhere. I use the software program Ulysses that lets you organize your ideas. I'm very technophobic, so that's the best I can explain it.

KARIN: Can you say anything about your new book?

TERRI: Well, I can say what it feels like at the moment. I'd like to write about recovery from substance abuse and mental illness because that's called a 'dual diagnosis' when you have both.

There's a lot of addiction and recovery memoirs out there, so I'm a little nervous about that. But I don't think there's been enough about dual diagnosis. I facilitated a mental health support group for dual diagnosis for about 15 years at UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and heard a lot of stories. I'm still in a group. I just joined one in fact. And I think the issues are different when you have the combined forces attacking you. It's really a tough recovery and I'd like to write about that. It's funny, there are whole areas of my life that I haven't written about because I've been too ashamed, if you can believe that after reading everything that I've written already. But I heard if you have shame, it's probably a good thing to start writing about.

KARIN: It is pretty shocking that there are areas you haven't explored yet.

TERRI: I know. I didn't really want to go there. But I have used up a lot of my life in three books. So I think it's time to turn to the stuff that was very difficult. I felt like with alcohol there was more of a volitional aspect than with bipolar disorder, which feels to me like it was not within my control.

KARIN: I see. So, you relate personally to the dual diagnosis?

TERRI: Very much so. I'm 21 years sober, so I went through quite a journey.

KARIN: How have you become a better writer over the years? Have you always been a writer?

TERRI: Interesting question. I have written all my life since I was a little girl. My father would read to me and encouraged me to write poetry, and that was a huge bond between us. So I always wanted to write. The entertainment law, while it had its perks, was a major detour off my true passion. I was an English major and I always envisioned myself as a writer and never really let that dream go. But I've noticed my writing changing over the years, which is exciting and scary at the same time because I think I write more simply now than I used to. I don't know if that's because I've used up all the words already or if I really just have a clear thought process after writing so much.

KARIN: Are you more confident in some way?

TERRI: Well, I hear a pretty strong rhythm in my head and that guides me. I got that from, of all things, the Hudson Harlem line—the train from Poughkeepsie from Vassar College going into New York City—where I went every weekend to go play and go to the museums. I would hear that train sound and that's when I would do all my writing and my homework and it got into me. It got into my bones somehow and got in my head. So my writing has always been rhythmic, whether it's poetry or memoir. I haven't lost that sense of internal rhythm. That's why I can't write when like rock music is playing. I can only write if classical music is playing. Anything that disrupts that rhythm is going to disrupt my writing.

I don't know if that answers your question but It's just a very lovely memory of going on the train and writing to the wheels.

KARIN: What a great touchstone for you.

So, is the simplicity about less words, or more minimalist in sentence structure?

TERRI: Yes. Less metaphors. A little less flowery, I'd say.

I don't agonize over every image as much as I used to. So I wouldn't say it's easier. I don't think writing is ever easy, but it does flow more than it used to. I used to have terrible writer's block and I don't seem to have that. That's something I'd love to tell your readers. I went to see Dennis Palumbo, the writing coach, and he told me to “write one moment” and those three words have gotten me through so much. Just write one moment, because you get so overwhelmed by a lot of the story and characters. I've found when I write one moment and I focus on my internal sensations, something happens... something comes up.

It breaks through that ice.



Buy the book!

To learn more about Terri Cheney, visit her site.

See all interviews