Susie Orman Schnall, Author of THE SUBWAY GIRLS
[0:00]Welcome to mom's don't have time to read books, the podcast that features conversations
[0:15]with writers of all types.
[0:17]Today's episode of mom's don't have time to read books has been sponsored by the craft studio,
[0:21]with locations in New York City on the upper east side of in Tribeca, the craft studio
[0:25]is a perfect place to bring your kids for some crafting fun.
[0:28]Craft Studio NYC.com.
[0:30]I'm really excited to be interviewing Susie Orman Schnall today.
[0:33]Susie is the author of Three Novels, The Subway Girls, The Balance Project, and On Grace.
[0:39]She founded The Balance Project interview series, in which she interviewed 163 women,
[0:44]like Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Michelle Geller, about how to achieve work-life balance.
[0:48]She has contributed to many publications, including Harper's Bazaar, Huff Post, Glamour
[0:52]and others.
[0:53]An L.A. native, she attended the University of Pennsylvania, and now lives in purchase
[0:57]New York with her husband and three cents.
[0:59]So welcome Susie, thanks for coming on mom's don't have time to read books.
[1:03]Thank you so much for having me on her.
[1:06]Thank you for listening to Haven't Read The Subway Girls, which is my personal favorite
[1:09]of yours.
[1:10]What is it about?
[1:11]So The Subway Girls is about two strong and ambitious women who are trying to realize
[1:17]their dreams both personally and professionally, and it's all set against the real-life
[1:23]advertising campaign of the Mid-Subways advertising contest, and just to give you a little
[1:29]sense of what that is, is Ms. Subway's, so in the early 40s, the MTA wanted to increase
[1:37]writer morale and also draw eyeballs up to the advertisements on the subway system.
[1:43]And so the hired J. Walter Thompson, which was the preeminent advertising agency at the
[1:47]time, and J. Walter Thompson came up with this idea for a beauty contest.
[1:52]And J. Walter Thompson hired John Robert Powers, which was the big modeling agency to judge
[1:57]the contest.
[1:58]It wasn't a beauty contest where the women were walking up and down the aisles of the subway
[2:03]cars.
[2:04]It was a, the women mailed their photographs into John Robert Powers and John Robert Powers
[2:10]chose a woman each month to be Ms. Subway's.
[2:14]And her photograph, along with a few sentences about her ambitions, and her personality
[2:20]would be posted up on subway posters for millions of writers to see every single month.
[2:27]So so my story is dual storyline in 1949, you have Charlotte, who wants to go into advertising,
[2:36]and she ends up competing in the Ms. Subway's contest, and in 2018, you have Olivia,
[2:44]who is a female advertising executive, and she is pitching the MTA count, comes across
[2:51]the Ms. Subway's contest in her research, the two storylines end of intersecting, and that's
[2:56]sort of the fun to begin.
[2:57]Excellent.
[2:58]And how did you come up with this idea?
[3:00]I was listening to NPR in my car one day, and a story came on, radio diaries about the
[3:07]Ms. Subway's contest, and I listened to it, and I was just blown away.
[3:11]A beauty contest in the subway system, it just seemed so unreal to me.
[3:15]I didn't grow up in New York, so I hadn't never seen, you know, or heard of this just
[3:21]from, and don't leave her, so I went home, and I re-listened to that radio diaries
[3:28]story, and it spoke a lot about this nonfiction book called Meet Ms. Subway's, where two
[3:34]women had researched the Ms. Subway's contest, and also had sought out all of the 200 winners.
[3:42]As I said, the contest ran for 1941 to 1996, and 200 women won the contest during that
[3:48]time.
[3:49]So these two authors, Fiona Gardner and Amy Zimmer, one of them, for one another, they
[3:55]tried to locate all of the 200 winners, found 41 of them, and photographed and interviewed
[4:01]all of them.
[4:02]And so I then bought that book, started reading that, became even more fascinating than
[4:06]in the problem with the contest, and thought that it would make such an interesting premise
[4:11]for a novel, because there's so much impact there.
[4:15]So really interesting, slice of life history of New York City, that very few people
[4:21]know about.
[4:22]And then there's all the female ambition, juicy material in there, she really wrapped
[4:30]my hands around, because that's an interest of mine in exploring through fiction.
[4:36]Excellent.
[4:38]I really loved the part in the book.
[4:40]When Olivia is talking to her associate Priya, this is in the modern day part of the
[4:44]book at the ad agency, and Priya says, when I meet women in their 80s and 90s, it's
[4:49]easy to forget that they were living these vibrant lives when they were younger.
[4:52]It's awful, but I admit that I underestimate older women.
[4:55]And then Olivia responds, I know what you're saying, you just assume that the time they
[4:58]lived in were so different that they couldn't possibly know what it's like for us.
[5:03]But you know what?
[5:04]From reading those posters and all the other articles, those women were going through
[5:08]the same shape we are, all the conflicts with work and personal lives, that is nothing
[5:11]new.
[5:12]So I was hoping you could tell me more about that scene and the takeaway and how you
[5:17]personally decided to add it to the narrative.
[5:19]You said you were interested in the obviously with the work-life balance and the balance
[5:23]interviews.
[5:24]Yeah.
[5:25]Tell me more about it.
[5:26]Yeah.
[5:27]So it's a few different things.
[5:29]It's the fact that I myself feel that way.
[5:32]You know, I underestimate older women sometimes, but I'm always interested when I meet
[5:40]an older woman to really talk to her and find out her story.
[5:44]And I do this a lot now whenever, you know, I love going out with friends and their moms
[5:48]because, or their grandma's because I just, I love hearing their stories and what got
[5:54]them, what was interesting for them at the time, what the obstacles were, what the challenges
[5:59]were for them and what their things and admissions were.
[6:02]And I think that I really was able to absorb that and use that information for this book
[6:09]by reading Amy and doing this book, Meet Ms. Subway's, which gives the history.
[6:14]So let me back down first again when I first heard about Ms. Subway's and NPR, I wanted
[6:18]to know, you know, who were these women that entered the contest?
[6:22]Why did they enter the contest?
[6:23]What was it like for them to win and how did winning affect the rest of their lives?
[6:28]And in the book Meet Ms. Subway's, the nonfiction book, they, that's what the stories
[6:34]were.
[6:35]So each woman has about three or four pages and I got to find out the answers to those
[6:38]questions.
[6:39]And you learn, you know, it allowed me to learn a lot about a lot of women and I mainly
[6:44]focused on women who won in the 40s and 50s because that was the focus of the book.
[6:49]But it just opened my eyes to what women were going through at the time and it's all about
[6:57]kind of the social construct of the time and it's very difficult to look at it through
[7:01]our eyes and in our reality in 2018 or even when we were shooting professions because
[7:10]the cultural constructs and the expectations for women were just so different.
[7:14]You know, I mean, women were, it was, I'm not going to use the word expected to marry
[7:19]early or expected to have kids younger.
[7:21]It was just the norm and when you're brought up in a way that this is normal, a lot
[7:28]of women, I don't want to say it doesn't occur to them to go against the norm because
[7:35]that makes them sound as if they don't have agency.
[7:39]But sometimes when something is just the expectation, it's just what you do, you know?
[7:45]And so, gosh, I don't even know where I was, I think that I just, I think that when
[7:54]you really start to focus on what women wanted, you may learn that they wanted something
[8:00]different, but it was because of either their own financial situation or their family
[8:06]situation that they have to take a different path.
[8:09]Yep.
[8:10]And you did such a good job of that when you talked about, when Charlotte, who was in
[8:15]your, you know, 1949 narrative, you know, you juxtaposed that her professional life now
[8:20]with Olivia's in her ad agency.
[8:23]And you wrote, but now that she has graduated and none of her other job prospects had
[8:28]come to fruition, Charlotte realized that she had to just resign herself to the new reality
[8:32]that she would be living at home, working at her father's store and that was that, not
[8:36]every girl's dreams came true.
[8:37]Not every girl was destined to feel like she had sidesteped expectations that every girl
[8:41]could be significant.
[8:42]So, I thought that was like, I thought that was so depressing, like, did everybody feel
[8:46]like that?
[8:48]Charlotte's dream was like to be in the typing pool of an ad agency and now she's like,
[8:52]oh, I guess I can't do it.
[8:53]My four job applications didn't work out.
[8:55]Like, oh my gosh, anyway, it was a good, it's very good highlight of how things were
[9:02]back then, I guess, for me.
[9:03]Yeah.
[9:04]Yes and really, as I said, it depended on a woman, dependent upon her own personal ambitions
[9:10]and her own family situation because look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
[9:14]She was approximately the same age as Charlotte is in the story and Ruth Bader Ginsburg
[9:19]graduated from Cornell and went to Harvard Law School as one of the six or nine women
[9:24]in a class in Harvard Law School class in 500 and so it really, really depended on so many
[9:30]things and again, looking at it through our lens is difficult because if it was the norm
[9:37]to get married and have kids younger, which Ruth Bader Ginsburg did as well, we should
[9:41]have married young, right out of college and had children young and I mean it was hard
[9:47]to, at that time, to have children and go to law school and then become a judge, you know,
[9:53]to become aware and all that.
[9:55]And so many women, it just didn't even seem like something they could even aspire to.
[10:00]And the rules were different.
[10:03]A lot of companies required a husband's permission.
[10:06]If you got married and you worked,
[10:08]your husband had to get a permission for you
[10:10]to continue working.
[10:11]And so it just, I don't wanna underestimate
[10:15]or minimize the ambitions of these women
[10:20]by judging them from our reality
[10:22]because I just think everything was so different.
[10:25]But what's amazing are the women who defy those odds
[10:30]and defy those expectations and pave the way for us.
[10:34]And I'm so thankful for them.
[10:35]Oh, me too.
[10:39]To switch gears a little.
[10:42]So you wrote in such this like knowing, touching way.
[10:45]Charlotte, you had Charlotte's brother die in this book
[10:49]and in the war.
[10:50]And you wrote in such a nuanced way
[10:54]about how it was affecting her mom, her dad, herself
[10:58]and over time, how it wasn't beginning how it evolved.
[11:01]And I wondered where that storyline came from
[11:04]if that was a personal loss for you.
[11:06]If you just were interested in exploring that
[11:09]in a novel.
[11:10]Anyway.
[11:11]Yeah, I mean, it was kind of,
[11:12]it wasn't a personal for me in my family.
[11:16]To be honest, it was a device for the novel
[11:18]in a couple answers first.
[11:21]It was a device for the novel because it's Charlotte's brother
[11:24]where a lot of he would have taken over the family business.
[11:27]And I wanted, you know, this isn't really giving anything away.
[11:30]But Charlotte's father is requiring her to come work
[11:34]at their family store.
[11:35]And the brother had been alive.
[11:37]He would have done that, which would have freed her up
[11:39]to pursue her ambition.
[11:41]So in order for her to be the one who was required
[11:45]to work at the father's store, there couldn't be a brother
[11:47]in the picture.
[11:48]So that's, but I also wanted her to have a brother
[11:50]so that there was just a lot of family relationships
[11:53]that were, and her family reality that is based on the fact
[11:57]that her brother did die in the war.
[11:58]And it was just very, you know, it was reality at the times
[12:02]that young men didn't come home from the war.
[12:07]But I've also, you know, as we all have witnessed young people
[12:12]taken too early from their families.
[12:14]And so there definitely was some reflection
[12:16]on what I've seen with friends and families
[12:20]and was able to build the story from there.
[12:23]I think you did such a nice job with that.
[12:25]It was very, very like gritty and real.
[12:27]And I really liked it.
[12:29]You also had this lovely scene towards the end
[12:32]where Charlotte is talking to her mom.
[12:34]He would have been pretty withdrawn up until then.
[12:36]I hope I'm not, I don't think I'm giving,
[12:37]I'm not giving anything away.
[12:39]And I tried not to, my question.
[12:42]And then her mom suddenly opens up and says, you know,
[12:44]I've learned valuable lessons from a lot of experiences.
[12:47]She's talking about the story.
[12:48]Each of those scenarios seem so important,
[12:50]like nothing else in the world can continue as normal
[12:52]because I was experiencing something so critical.
[12:55]But you know what, life goes on.
[12:56]The world outside does not stop for a second for a little.
[12:59]And that's what they are in the scheme of things.
[13:00]Little individual problems.
[13:02]It took me a long time to learn that.
[13:04]And I don't want you to have to be my age when you figure it out.
[13:07]So do you think that when we're in the thick of it, right?
[13:11]I love the wisdom of the mother looking back,
[13:14]like all the younger people, like me or whatever, everybody.
[13:17]Can we even, can we stop and have that vantage point now?
[13:21]Or do you think we have to get older?
[13:23]Or like is hearing it?
[13:25]You know, you can hear things and not internalize it.
[13:27]Do you think it's possible?
[13:29]Or do you think what do you think?
[13:30]I just think it depends on the person's own individual experiences.
[13:33]I think if you went through something as a teenager and came,
[13:36]I think you have to come out on the other side of something big
[13:39]in order to have that wisdom.
[13:41]And I just, so it obviously depends on what each person
[13:45]has gone through in his or her own life.
[13:48]And I think it's incredibly difficult to have
[13:50]any perspective on anything when you are the one
[13:54]in the middle of it, whatever it may be, illness or death
[13:58]or losing a job or losing anything like that.
[14:01]And so I've always appreciated the perspective of older people
[14:07]who've gone through so much.
[14:10]And at that time, her parents had gone through the death
[14:12]of their child and lived during the war.
[14:15]And it was just such a different reality than what we're dealing
[14:19]with, luckily.
[14:19]But yeah, I think that's what older, wiser people are for.
[14:23]It's to give us that perspective.
[14:25]And to the adage, this two-shot pass is really, really true.
[14:31]In most things, when you're deep in the think
[14:34]of this two-shot pass, though it doesn't seem like it's
[14:37]possible at the time, because everything's so heavy and so
[14:40]fraught.
[14:41]When you do come out on the other side, you're
[14:44]able to look back and then learn from that experience
[14:48]the lessons that they have.
[14:50]I had this coffee once with a girl I worked with at my very
[14:53]first job.
[14:53]She was probably five years.
[14:54]I mean, she couldn't have been more than 30 at the time.
[14:57]And she took me out to lunch and something had been going on.
[14:59]I can't remember what.
[15:00]Anyway, she said to me, all right,
[15:01]well, think about the worst things ever happened in your life.
[15:04]Do you have it?
[15:04]And I was like, yeah.
[15:06]She's like, well, you got, you got past that, didn't you?
[15:09]And I was like, yeah.
[15:09]So anyway, I cannot even remember her name.
[15:12]But anyway, I think about that a lot, because having that
[15:16]advice from someone older and just, you know,
[15:18]the perspective, I guess.
[15:19]Right.
[15:19]And I think that I don't know about you, but I have,
[15:23]when I've experienced things that were too pleasant or
[15:26]whatever, some big things, you realize, OK, you can get
[15:31]through it.
[15:31]You are stronger than you thought you could have been.
[15:34]And so sometimes when things seem so dire, you think
[15:36]what's the worst thing that can happen.
[15:38]And could I get through that?
[15:40]Yeah, you could, you know, that's just life.
[15:42]So yeah.
[15:44]OK.
[15:44]Didn't mean to get there.
[15:46]But anyway, just from a writing perspective, the two
[15:51]story lines at different times, how did you go about writing
[15:53]that?
[15:54]Did you like write a whole book about one character and then
[15:57]a whole other book, tell me about your method to the.
[15:59]So when I realized that I wanted to do dual story line, I
[16:04]questioned how to attempt it as you're asking right then.
[16:08]And I reached out to a couple of authors I know who had
[16:12]written dual story lines to ask them how they did it.
[16:14]And of course, they all came back with a different answer.
[16:16]So then I just decided to do what worked for me.
[16:19]And I found that I wrote one story line at a time.
[16:23]So I wrote all of 1949, Charlotte's story.
[16:26]And then I wrote all of 2018, Olivia's story.
[16:29]And then what I did was I actually put a notation each chapter.
[16:33]I made an index card for each chapter of what happened.
[16:37]And I laid them, you know, 1949 out on my floor in one row in
[16:42]2018 on the next row.
[16:44]And even though they were in chapters already, I kind of
[16:46]moved things around to figure out how to, you know,
[16:50]interlock them.
[16:51]And the thing that was tricky and what I had to go back and forth
[16:56]on a couple of times was there were certain things that the
[17:01]reader knew in 2018 about Charlotte that Charlotte didn't know
[17:06]yet about herself in her 1949 story.
[17:09]And I had to decide whether it was more fun for the reader
[17:12]to know something about Charlotte that hadn't happened to her yet.
[17:15]Or if the reader should find out when Charlotte did.
[17:18]And so I kind of had to manipulate that a little bit and
[17:22]go back and forth testing out which way I thought worked.
[17:27]And then I had to, you know, when I when I would decide when
[17:30]I would have to go back and pull out little clues that
[17:34]they didn't want to be clues yet.
[17:35]So that's how I went about it.
[17:37]And I think that I would do it exactly that way another time.
[17:41]And I know authors who write, you know, one chapter, one,
[17:45]two, three, four, five, six, seven.
[17:46]And they find that it helps them be fresher because they've
[17:51]taken themselves out of, you know, storyline A to work on
[17:55]storyline B. And then they can go back to storyline A.
[17:58]That would not work for me.
[17:59]But it's interesting how everybody does it, but it may.
[18:02]That is interesting.
[18:05]So in terms of when you were writing, how do you like to
[18:08]write?
[18:08]Do you write right there at your desk with a beautiful
[18:11]camera?
[18:12]Do you?
[18:13]Like what's your, what's your structure?
[18:15]How do you do it?
[18:16]Like what's your message?
[18:17]Yeah.
[18:18]So I've now written four books, three I published and my fourth
[18:20]book, I'm in editing process for and it's kind of been
[18:23]different for each one.
[18:26]But typically I write, yeah, I wrote one, yeah, I've written
[18:30]them all in different places.
[18:32]But the, the similarities, it's added desk in a very
[18:36]quiet place.
[18:38]I prefer to write on a desktop as opposed to a laptop, because
[18:42]I just feel like I have a bigger screen because I have,
[18:45]especially for this book, for my third and fourth books,
[18:49]which had more of a historical aspect to it.
[18:51]I have Safari open, you know, I'm looking at, at different
[18:54]things online.
[18:55]I mean, I'm on the internet doing some research and stuff like
[19:00]that.
[19:01]So I like to have a big screen and I have my piles of
[19:02]no books all around.
[19:03]But my writing of my first draft is the, is the, is the
[19:08]shortest part of my process.
[19:11]So I spend, for instance, for the subway girls, I started
[19:16]writing in January and ended in about October, but the
[19:19]writing of the first draft took only two weeks.
[19:21]It's a, I spend a ton of time, especially for that book,
[19:25]doing research and plotting and outlining and trying to
[19:28]figure out how the story is going to go, what the, what the
[19:33]journeys are of the two main characters, you know, how
[19:35]they're going to evolve from the beginning of the story to
[19:37]the end of the story, making sure I have enough conflicts and
[19:40]high points and low points and, and really wanting to be
[19:44]authentic and accurate with the history.
[19:46]And then I write the first draft halfway through I
[19:50]throughout my outlines and, and all that because, you know,
[19:53]you can only, I follow it to a, to a, to some extent, and
[19:59]then everything changed.
[20:00]is because the story just starts to take on a direction of its own, re-outline and thought.
[20:05]And then I spend a great deal of time on my revisions because I write very, very fast
[20:09]and I get kind of the bones of the novel out, you know, it might be 60,000 words
[20:14]when the finished focus closer to 80,000 words.
[20:17]And so then I layer on, you know, once I'm done with the first draft, then I make the
[20:22]language prettier.
[20:23]I add a little bit more setting and mood and all of that sort of stuff.
[20:30]I find it's just easier to get the story out onto the page and then have something to
[20:34]work with.
[20:35]And then it goes through the whole editing process that the publishing has.
[20:38]So it's a process.
[20:40]Wow.
[20:41]How did you get into writing to begin with?
[20:44]My career before I had kids, so I was three boys, they are 13, 15, and 17, and before
[20:51]I had my 17-year-old, I worked in marketing communications for nonprofit organizations, advertising
[20:58]agencies, internet companies, and magazines.
[21:01]But then when I had him, I stopped working full-time and wrote articles, freelance, or magazines,
[21:08]websites, and just kind of evolved.
[21:10]I just had always thought that I wanted to write a book but never took that very seriously
[21:15]until at one point I was just not loving the journalists excited what I was doing.
[21:20]I was more interested in the creative side of writing and thought that it would be a
[21:24]good next step and a good challenge and a good project.
[21:26]So I decided to do that, I think, around 2010 and wrote my first book that year or the
[21:34]next year.
[21:35]And it just became something I really enjoyed doing.
[21:37]I think it's a great job for me as a mom because it's very flexible and I can do it from
[21:43]home.
[21:44]And it's turned out to be a great career for this for me.
[21:48]That's great.
[21:49]Do you structure it like you go into your office and work from this time to this time?
[21:54]Like, I'm at work, don't bother me or how do you do it?
[21:57]Yeah, well, for me, my experience as authors is a very cyclical business in a sense that
[22:04]there are some authors who write every single day, no matter what, I'm not like that.
[22:08]I just came off, so here's a perfect example.
[22:12]I finished the last revision on my fourth book, which is not out yet, in May, and then
[22:20]starting and turned that in.
[22:22]And then I started working on all the pre-launch stuff for the subway girls that came out
[22:28]July.
[22:29]So I basically spent my entire summer just working on the subway girls' launch on book
[22:34]tour, marketing, and all of that.
[22:37]I did not even take a look at my manuscript, which the next revisions do November 1st.
[22:43]And then starting today, when the kids started school today, I'm back in my office and
[22:49]ready to start working on my manuscript again.
[22:53]And I still have a lot of book tour events to go to for the next six months or so, but
[22:59]I am focused now on the writing.
[23:01]But once I turn that revision in November 1st, then I'll have a break from writing.
[23:05]And I won't, you know, it's not like the very next day I'll start on my next book.
[23:09]So that's how I work, but yes, on a work day, and again, it depends on the work day.
[23:14]If it's a writing day, it is like, I'd like to exercise in the morning, but as soon as
[23:20]that's done, it is sitting in my office.
[23:22]And my kids are older in the house, so it's not like I had to, I don't even have to go
[23:25]to pick up that school because my oldest one drives, so I can sit in my office and work
[23:30]until five o'clock and that's fine in my house.
[23:35]But if I'm in the middle of writing a manuscript, it has to be a day where I have at least
[23:40]eight hours.
[23:41]I need to know that I have two weeks straight of eight to nine hour days.
[23:47]I need to get into the story and that's when I feel that I'm the most productive, but
[23:51]if it's an editing day, I can have three hours or two hours or four hours.
[23:55]And if it's a marketing day, I can have an hour here and an hour there.
[23:58]And I really just depends what I'm working on.
[24:01]That's great.
[24:02]I mean, I think that's what's so great about writing, it's like you're not just doing
[24:05]the same thing every day.
[24:06]Yeah.
[24:07]Right?
[24:08]It's like always new people and the characters you invent and the characters you read
[24:11]about and like how you do that.
[24:13]And then there's some sort of media marketing.
[24:16]It's like a whole thing.
[24:17]We have to spend so much time on social media too.
[24:20]Yeah.
[24:21]So that's kind of a bit more.
[24:23]But anyway, so tell me a little more about the balance project interviews.
[24:28]So how did you, so the book was a novel, not about these interviews, then you launched
[24:35]the project and interviewed 163 women.
[24:38]Other way around.
[24:39]So I was struggling myself how to be the type of mother I wanted to be, how to be the
[24:45]type of professional I wanted to be.
[24:47]It just, I couldn't figure out how to do it because I really wanted to be that mother,
[24:53]that present mother for my kids and this is getting into, I am not judging anybody's
[24:57]choices at all.
[24:58]It's so fraught.
[25:00]I talk a lot.
[25:01]I talk to a lot of groups about work like balance and there are so many expectations
[25:07]to be a quote unquote good mother and I think it's so harmful to women.
[25:11]And so I'm all for doing what works for you.
[25:14]But I was having trouble figuring out what worked for me in terms of what I wanted for
[25:18]my own life.
[25:19]And so I started just asking friends who had jobs that I respected in clean children.
[25:26]Like how do you do it?
[25:27]How do you keep on balls in the air?
[25:29]And I decided to formalize those questions and created the balance project interview series.
[25:35]And basically what that is is it's on my, I post the interviews on my website SuzyShall.com.
[25:42]And to date I have 175 interviews up there and every woman answers the same 15 or some
[25:49]amount of questions.
[25:51]And when I set out to do the interviews I was hoping, as I said to find out how
[25:56]to balance it all.
[25:58]And what I found out instead is that nobody is really doing it all.
[26:01]Everybody is making sacrifices.
[26:03]Anybody says that they are perfect in all of the realms of their lives, all the time
[26:06]it's sustainable levels.
[26:08]It's just lying to you because I found that a woman who I had great admiration for and was
[26:16]trying to emulate in many ways she was sleeping four hours a night.
[26:19]I found that another person was having a lot of relationship issues.
[26:22]And so I realized that well I want to sleep eight hours a night and I don't want to have
[26:27]relationship issues but therefore I'm going to have to give on some of the hours that
[26:31]I put into my job.
[26:32]And so these are the things that we have to figure out but to talk.
[26:36]And so I then continued those interviews and when I was deciding what to write my second
[26:40]novel about I was so inspired by the interviews and the responses that they had been getting
[26:45]that I decided to write a novel about it.
[26:50]And again, as you mentioned, the balanced project novel is not a companion of the articles.
[26:56]It's just about the topic of work like balance about two women, a young woman who's 25
[27:02]and her bosses 45 and how they work together and each of them is struggling with her own
[27:08]work like balance.
[27:09]But the characters are informed by the interviews that I did and also women I speak to during
[27:14]my talks.
[27:15]And so why did you not make the interviews into a book?
[27:19]I did consult with one agent a long time ago about that who said that novels like that
[27:24]books to like that don't sell.
[27:27]That's one person whether or not that's true or not, I don't know.
[27:31]That was also when I had like 15 interviews so it's just nothing that I focused on but
[27:36]what's interesting is that in the novel, the balance project, my 45-year-old main character
[27:42]Katherine, she's basically a Sheryl Sandberg-esque type character but instead of coming
[27:49]out of the book called Lena and she has come out with a book called The Balance Project.
[27:54]It's all very tricky.
[27:55]Everything's in the balance project and I outline in that book kind of a four section,
[28:03]the four sections of the balance project book which someday maybe I will write that book.
[28:08]I never really wanted to be academically expert at work, I found there are a lot of people
[28:14]doing that.
[28:15]I'm more interested in the anecdotal aspect of it.
[28:19]But you know, like the interviews have been picked up, working mother, we publish a lot
[28:23]of them in video series of them so they're definitely getting exposure in other media
[28:29]but someday maybe.
[28:31]So I feel like you love digging deep with either the women you're interviewing, the elderly
[28:37]people.
[28:38]Like, have you always just been interested in other people's experiences?
[28:41]Is that just sort of a part of your personality and now you're using it better good?
[28:46]Yeah.
[28:47]I always say that if I had to start over, I might be a social anthropologist.
[28:50]I'm just fascinated by how people live their lives.
[28:53]That's why I watch reality shows sometimes because I think it's fascinating because I feel
[28:59]like I'm very somewhat mainstream and kind of straighten narrow, kind of a nerdy girl
[29:04]who likes to write and these people are just doing these crazy things and so I like
[29:08]to watch and just see how other people live their lives and I think it's fantastic that
[29:14]there are so many different ways to go about it but yes, I do love hearing people's
[29:18]stories and what makes people tick and what sort of life circumstances led them to be
[29:25]that way and I think that that's something I've only come to as I've gotten older.
[29:29]I think that was a lot more judgmental when I was younger and now I think about what
[29:34]was it like to walk in that person's moccasins and I don't know what it would be like
[29:39]to grow up this way or that way and you can't necessarily judge some of these for being
[29:44]this personality or that personality or this driven or not driven without really seeing
[29:50]how they were formed and how their parents were formed and that really informs the person's
[29:55]personality, great deal as well as does and I talk about this a lot in my work way.
[30:00]I found talks as as a person's just makeup, you know,
[30:03]like I get overwhelmed very, very easily
[30:06]when there's too much on my plate, except if it's
[30:09]in cheese plate, I really like a lot of things.
[30:11]I get overwhelmed very easily,
[30:13]and I look at somebody like Sheryl Sandberg,
[30:15]and I say, you can't compare yourself
[30:16]to Sheryl Sandberg, who is just killing it professionally,
[30:20]because she, I'm imagining, I don't know her,
[30:24]but I imagine she must be able to handle
[30:27]a lot more, her constitution, her composition,
[30:31]how she's made up, and mentally what she can handle.
[30:34]And so I try not to compare myself to other people that way,
[30:37]and again, that just feeds into why I really like
[30:41]talking to people and asking them why they tick,
[30:43]how they tick.
[30:45]I feel like it's like when you go in the gym,
[30:46]and everybody can lift a certain amount
[30:48]before they've done any training,
[30:50]it's just like what you can lift, right?
[30:51]Yes, how it is.
[30:52]I don't know.
[30:53]And I was not accused of I meant somebody,
[30:55]and I was, it was out of the party,
[30:57]and I was asking, it's like a small,
[31:00]but like a dinner party in front of us,
[31:02]and there was this couple that I never met before,
[31:04]and I ended up talking to the husband,
[31:06]and I was asking him, you know, like where did you grow up,
[31:08]where did you show to school?
[31:09]And he's like, what are you trying to box me in?
[31:12]And it's funny, because I wasn't, you know,
[31:14]he thought I was trying to label him,
[31:16]or identify him as to whether he was worth talking to.
[31:19]And it was the complete opposite.
[31:21]I just like knowing, you know, what buckets,
[31:24]you know, what stepping stones,
[31:26]people had been on,
[31:27]and how it kind of frames who they are today,
[31:31]but I can see how somebody might take it the wrong way.
[31:35]Yeah, that's a shame.
[31:36]I feel like it's nice to show such interest
[31:39]in other people.
[31:39]I mean, it's refreshing, and anyway.
[31:42]So just, I know we're almost out of time.
[31:43]Do you have any advice to aspiring writers out there?
[31:48]Advice to aspiring writers,
[31:50]I would say just stay true to yourself.
[31:53]Don't write for any other reason,
[31:55]except that that's what you wanna do.
[31:57]Also manage expectations of yourself.
[32:00]Don't listen to all these myths of,
[32:03]you have to write every day, or you have to do this,
[32:05]or you have to do that.
[32:06]I mean, every writer, I've done a lot of events now
[32:09]with other writers, and we always talk about process
[32:12]and all that, and everybody's doing it differently.
[32:15]You don't have some, you know,
[32:16]some people have an MFA,
[32:17]some people have never taken a writing class in their lives,
[32:20]and you can be successful in so many ways.
[32:22]So I would just say stay true to yourself,
[32:25]figure out what you wanna write,
[32:26]but then also get input from professionals.
[32:30]Don't put yourself out.
[32:31]If you are writing a manuscript,
[32:32]and you do wanna become an author,
[32:34]don't submit to, wait, my number one advice
[32:37]would be don't submit to agents,
[32:39]don't query agents until you've had
[32:41]your manuscript professionally edited,
[32:43]because their agents are need ways to meet opportunities
[32:47]to say no to manuscripts,
[32:49]because they just get too many.
[32:50]It's just a math issue.
[32:53]And so make sure that you're putting your best foot forward.
[32:56]That's from the very beginning.
[32:58]Well, thank you so much.
[33:00]I really appreciate all of your time,
[33:01]and it was really great talking to you.
[33:03]Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[33:05]I'm so glad that you invited me.
[33:07]Oh, it was my pleasure.
[33:08]Thank you so much. Bye.
[33:10]Bye.
[33:11]This episode of Moms don't have time to read books,
[33:13]has been sponsored by the Craft Studio.
[33:15]Craft Studio NYC.com with locations on the Upper East Side,
[33:18]and then Tribeca.
[33:19]The Craft Studio will meet all your families' crafting needs.
[33:22]Be sure to check it out. Thanks.
[33:24]Moms don't have time to read books.