Oh my, how quickly things change in just one week!
I'm writing to you from the trenches in Los Angeles where we have been ordered to stay at home as this global health crisis unfolds. I hope this finds you safe, wherever you are in the world.
Let me tell you about the awesome woman I'm featuring this month! Tara Schuster, the current Vice President of Talent and Development at Comedy Central, has a new memoir out called Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies. While it may be an odd time for a book release, the theme of the book couldn't be more relevant. It's all about how to take care of yourself, and in our interview below, Tara offers some helpful ways to think about what that means in the current climate.
Tara, by the way, will be visiting the Unlocking Your Story workshop this Spring!
Tara Schuster is an author, playwright, and accomplished entertainment executive, currently serving as Vice President of Talent and Development at Comedy Central. She is currently the Executive in Charge of Lights Out with David Spade and was the Executive in Charge of the Emmy® and Peabody Award-winning Key & Peele. Her plays have been performed in The New York International Fringe Festival and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and Forbes online.
Tara's hilarious and relatable self-help/memoir Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies tells the story of Tara’s path to re-parenting herself and becoming a “ninja of self-love.” By the time Tara was in her late twenties, she was a rising TV executive who had worked for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and helped launch Key & Peele to viral superstardom. By all appearances, she had mastered being a grown-up. But beneath that veneer of success, she was a chronically anxious, self-medicating mess.
Through simple, daily rituals, Tara transformed her mind, body, and relationships and hopes to help readers do the same. Her aim for the book is to help readers to create a life they truly, totally f*cking LOVE.
(Photo credit: Diana Ragland)
KARIN GUTMAN: How do you feel about releasing a book during this global crisis that is COVID-19?
TARA SCHUSTER: It's already difficult to launch a book, and then to launch a book within a pandemic is obviously much more difficult. I could get really depressed and down about all the events that we've had to cancel, or... the truth is I wrote this book because I thought this was my mission. As cheesy as it sounds, I felt like it was. The reason I was put on earth was to make other people feel less lonely in their experience. And now, more than ever, that is necessary.
So now I'm taking what could be a depressing situation and instead saying, “Let me be there for people. Let me get the mission of the book out there even more,” because we absolutely must take care of ourselves. In a crisis, if we are ground down and burnt out and not taking care of ourselves, we will not be able to help anyone around us. And so, I think it's really important, now more than ever, that people take themselves seriously and see that they're worth taking care of.
KARIN: What does taking care of ourselves look like?
TARA: The book is about practical, habitual changes you can make in your life. Big, big change scares the hell out of me, so I don't advocate that for anybody else. But the idea of habits and routine, and how rituals build stability... you can very easily get rid of your morning routine right now and stop working out and stop writing your gratitude list and stop journaling, because you stayed up so late watching Netflix, because you were trying to numb out. Or, you could hang on to those really good self-care rituals in the face of crisis.
I write a lot about exercise, which seems so basic. But I don't think everybody gets that message—that exercise, scientifically and just from my own journey, relieved such anxiety. And here in Los Angeles, my gym closed. Then I thought, “Aha, but I'll use my apartment building's gym.” And then, I go to that gym, and it's closed. And then, I went to the manager of the building and she would only talk to me through a glass door. And I stopped myself on the verge of tears, because exercising is such a central ritual for my self-care.
As I was in there, looking through the glass at the manager, I realized, “Wait, there's another door here.” It was the door to the stairwell of my apartment building, where I was like, “Oh, I can listen to Missy Elliott, and do 40 minutes of cardio.” That's a great workout in the stairwell, and there's literally no one here, and I'm not touching anything. The underlying thesis of the book is: you re-frame things. You are the narrator. So, you decide, Is this just total misery and chaos and awful, or is there something to be learned from it? And can you keep up some of your habits?
Yes, of course, this is a crisis. In no way do I minimize that. Obviously, this is a pandemic. But that doesn't mean everything has to be miserable and a worst-case scenario.
KARIN: We can also invent new rituals. I have a 7-year-old daughter who is home right now, and we’re inventing what that looks like for everyone.
TARA: Totally. For me, it's the opposite case. I've had a lot of people reach out to me saying, “It's difficult because all my kids are home, and so I'm having trouble working from home,” and lack of space. What I reminded them is that I'm all alone. I don't have a family or a partner or anyone. And so, I've had to come up with rituals to connect to people, and remembering that none of us are alone in our feelings of “this fucking sucks.” It doesn't matter your circumstance—full family, single, elderly—we all have to share this. It's a societal pain and disruption that we all are sharing in, right now.
KARIN: As you know, I teach memoir workshops, which you’ll be visiting in June! I’ve decided to teach them via Zoom for the spring sessions while this situation plays out.
TARA: Oh, great.
KARIN: I feel it’s really important to find ways to stay connected during this time.
TARA: Absolutely. I think it's important to also recognize, we say, “I'm going to self-improve this part of my life, when I have time.” Like, “When I've got my shit together, when I've got enough money… I'm going to work on my exercise, or my practice of non-judgment, or my book I've always wanted to write… when I have time.” Well guess what? We have time.
You could look at this as an absolute disaster and disruption, or that this is the reality. So how can I use it to my benefit and the benefit of my community? I think I'm going to use this time to work on the proposal for my second book. I have the time right now, so why not?
KARIN: How did you juggle a full-time job with writing your book?
TARA: I really have two separate careers, and I really thought of them as separation of church and state. So in the morning, I would basically chain myself to my desk, set a timer for an hour before I went to work. No Twitter, no Facebook, no Amazon, no nothing. Just writing. And then go work out, to change the gears in my head, and then go to work.
So that's been my process of writing, because it would be too overwhelming to try to juggle my job and my writing together. So I made them very distinct parts of my life.
KARIN: It sounds very structured.
TARA: Yeah, it was. I literally set a timer for an hour and when the timer went off, I was free to leave my desk. But I'm not a morning person. I had to trick myself into being a morning person in order to write the book. That was the only way I could do it, because I think I'm my smartest in the morning. And then I watch myself become slowly dumb as the day wears on. I could never write after work. I don't even know what I would say after work. I'm usually so tired.
And then on weekends...on Saturday, from 8:00 to 11:00. And if I needed more, sometimes it would be all of Saturday and all of Saturday night. But then, I tried never to write on Sundays. I tried to have one day where I wasn't on the hook. I didn't have to write.
KARIN: When you said you 'tricked' yourself, what was the carrot?
TARA: The carrot was a book. There was no other way this book was going to get written. Something I'd have to remind myself when I'd complain to myself is, “Nobody asked me to write this book.” It's not like a bunch of publishers were knocking down my door for me to do this. I embarked on it because I felt like I had a voice, and I had something to say. And the only way I was going to get to say it was if I fucking did it. So, the carrot was the book. And once I put it that way, it was never a question.
I also set up my home office, something I picked up in Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, which is so important to me. She talks a lot about discipline, the difference between discipline and enthusiasm. So many people have said to me, “Oh, you're so disciplined that you did this.” I'm like, “Truly, I wish that the word discipline applied to me, that would make my ego feel very good. It's enthusiasm.” Like… I'm really excited to write the book. I'm ecstatic that I had a place that wanted to publish the book. I let my enthusiasm drive me, and so it was a pleasure to wake up. The trick was, instead of, “Oh I have to do this,” is, “I get to do this,” and I let my enthusiasm drive the process.
KARIN: What was the publishing process like? It sounds like you had someone interested during the writing process.
TARA: I wrote a proposal with my agent over the course of nine months. A very detailed proposal, with a hundred sample pages and a complete outline. We pitched that to a bunch of different publishers, and it sold at auction, which was completely unexpected. I would have written the book for free, which I never want to tell my publisher, but I was determined that it really didn't matter, that I was going to do this. I preferred to do it with a real publisher, that was my dream. But I would have been happy to self-publish, because I felt like it was an important message to get out there.
KARIN: Why do you think there was a bidding war?
TARA: Yeah, why in the world would anybody...
KARIN: You can't take that the wrong way. Come on, now.
TARA: I'm just teasing. Remember I work in comedy.
KARIN: Right.
TARA: I think what it was… I have heard four million pitches. Working in TV, I hear pitches all day. I went to Brown for playwriting and Paula Vogel was one of my professors. The two things that those have in common is: at Comedy Central, we look for an authentic point of view, a real take on something. And Paula once told me that writing is about putting your thumbprint on the world and really getting down to your DNA. What is your unique take?
So I had practice in both identifying point of view and writing my point of view. So I think the pitch was just me on paper. After hearing a lot of pitches, I know it's hard to do that. It's hard to be really authentic and to not try to sell what you think will sell, but to be vulnerable. And actually, what's funny is that, one of the number one pieces of feedback I get from people is, “Oh my God, you're so honest. I can't believe how honest you are.”
At this point I've totally taken for granted that we're not all just honest all the time, because I've spent three years holding myself to the standard of, “Is this honest? Is this kind? Is this the most vulnerable I can be about it?” And I think that came through in the pitch.
KARIN: It's one thing to be able to identify an authentic, unique point of view. It's another thing to access that in yourself. Is that something that simply comes naturally to you? Or is that something that you learned?
TARA: I've talked to my editor about this. Not only did I go to school for playwriting, where Paula Vogel's style of teaching is basically, how much can you write? Like, a volume game. Don't be precious, don't self-edit. Write, write, write. And my number one piece of writing advice is that writing begets writing. I can't explain it, but if you write, you will write more. And if you don't write, you won't write anything. It's so simple, but it's so true.
And so, I think it's a combination of learning early in my writing career not to self-censor, and then taking up journaling in my mid 20s… those two things together. In my book I describe it as receiving DM’s from my soul. Like sneaky private messages of what was most true about me.
And journaling… I don't know of any other way I could have gotten to the point where now I can write consistently, in my own voice. Which is a funny thing because I'm me. After I wrote the book, they give you a style guide of your writing, like, What phrases do you use? Are thoughts in italics or are they in quotations? It's interesting because the copywriters may hold you to be even more consistent with yourself than you already are.
The whole process of writing the book—if you're writing memoir—makes you get more and more precise about your voice, and about how you talk about things. Like, "You call this friend this, but did you mean this?" And, "You use this word… did you really mean this word?"
KARIN: Did your journal voice change when you started writing the manuscript? Was it harder to be honest, because suddenly you're aware that you're writing for an audience?
TARA: For me, when I'm journaling, I know that nobody's ever going to read it and it's just for me. Journaling is how I rev up my engine. My process is: I journal for 20 minutes, then I meditate, then I write. So journaling is almost like, “Let me get all this shit out of my head. All these stupid thoughts, the distractions. Let me just get that all out of my head.”
KARIN: Like Julia Cameron’s morning pages?
TARA: Exactly. It's totally, 100%, Julia Cameron's morning pages. I just word vomit. Then, when I get to the actual writing, I'm more focused and in touch with myself. From that place, I write. I always imagine a reader with me. It's usually me as a little girl. Or, a reader who wants someone to be present with them. Sometimes I imagine a young woman or a young man, but there's always somebody in the room with me. I always think about them when I write. So, it's a two-pronged approach: I get all the garbage out of my head and align myself with my voice; and then I think about, “This writing now is for somebody else.” It is definitely for an audience, which is the big difference from journaling.
KARIN: Are these usually people you know?
TARA: I guess it's a little bit of a combination. I've got some undisclosed people that I think about, that I think could use the book. I'll think of one person, and then I'll think of people like them, and then I'll start to write. It's a little loose in that way.
KARIN: What about exposure? Given that you have a certain professional visibility, how is that for you now that the book is out?
TARA: It's tough. I was a little afraid that in my professional career, where I'm supposed to be a gatekeeper and an executive, that people would look down on me, or judge me, for being vulnerable. But then I realized, “Fuck them.” If somebody doesn't want to work with me, or they judge me because I was vulnerable and open, then why would that be somebody I wanted to work with anyway? So I had to tune it out. But it was really scary. I can completely empathize with other people who are nervous. But once you take the leap you realize, “Oh, that wasn't so scary, I'm going to be fine.”
KARIN: What has changed for you having written the book? Has anything shifted? Have you realized something that maybe you didn't know at the beginning of the process?
TARA: Yeah. So, this is going to sound crazy, but I thought the book might change my life in some material way. Like, I'd meet new people and maybe new career paths would be open to me. And that's all very true. But what I didn't expect was for the book to fundamentally change my life and the way I see everything. I thought it was going to be the end, like, “Okay, I have reconciled my childhood. I've given my offering. Here's the book. It's a tangible thing.” And now I realize, it's only the beginning. And it's fucking shocking. I'm in a process of reevaluating my relationships and the way I live. Because the message of the book, which was so clear to me, wasn't even completely clear to me until I finished it. Until it was in the world, and people were talking to me about it. So, it completely changed my life. It showed me I have so much more work to do, and that the book was not the end. It was just the beginning, as cheesy as that sounds.
KARIN: Can you give a specific example?
TARA: All of my relationships… Do I have strong enough boundaries? For every one of my rituals, I ask myself, What's the evolution of that? How present am I for my own life? How willing to feel my feelings am I? Where I thought it would be a 'period' to my childhood and to re-parenting, it's more like a complete new beginning, which I absolutely did not expect.
Buy the book!
To learn more about Tara Schuster, visit her website.
See all author interviews
