John Searles, SINGLE GIRLS
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked.
[0:02]I'm Zibi Owens.
[0:04]I've interviewed more than 2,000 authors on this show
[0:07]and learned endless amounts about storytelling,
[0:10]reinvention, and life itself.
[0:11]Because when you talk about books,
[0:13]you're really talking about life.
[0:15]So get ready to hear from today's best authors,
[0:18]the best-selling and the not yet discovered.
[0:20]Come find your next great read and the story behind it.
[0:24]Enjoy!
[0:27]John Sterling's is the author of Single Girls A Novel.
[0:30]You might have seen pictures of me posting
[0:32]from the launch party at Love Shack Fancy
[0:34]because Love Shack Fancy gave me a dress to wear,
[0:37]which my daughter thought was basically the coolest thing ever.
[0:41]So thank you for that, John.
[0:42]Anyway, John Sterling's is a New York Times best-selling
[0:45]and award-winning author of four novels.
[0:47]His books have been published in over a dozen languages
[0:50]and have been voted best of the year
[0:51]or top picks by Boston Globe Entertainment Weekly,
[0:55]salon, and the American Library Association.
[0:57]A frequent contributor to the New York Times
[0:59]and the Washington Post,
[1:01]John was a top editor at Cosmopolitan for two decades,
[1:04]first hired by Helen Gurley-Brown,
[1:06]which is incredibly relevant as you will see
[1:08]as we discuss this book.
[1:10]Welcome, John.
[1:11]Thank you so much for coming on totally bugged
[1:13]to talk about Single Girls Yay.
[1:15]I'm happy to be here always and be in the see you.
[1:18]Aw.
[1:19]So wait in the book, you have a line.
[1:21]What a unique experience, the writing of a book.
[1:24]Tell me about the experience of writing this book.
[1:28]You know, I usually write sort of darker,
[1:30]character driven suspense novels
[1:32]and oftentimes when I go on book tour,
[1:36]women come up to me afterwards
[1:37]because it's usually women up book signings
[1:39]and they come up and they say,
[1:39]you're so consani and bright and, you know,
[1:43]like a bright light, but your books are really dark and creepy
[1:46]and I'm afraid to read that.
[1:48]And I always felt a little like I let them down somehow.
[1:51]But also, I always had in my mind
[1:53]because I was an editor at Cosmopolitan for 23 years.
[1:58]I always had in the back of my mind
[1:59]that I wanted to write a book about Cosmo in the 1960s
[2:03]and Helen Garley Brown.
[2:05]I was first hired when she was the editor in chief.
[2:07]I just got out of the graduate school at NYU
[2:09]and I always wanted to write it
[2:11]and I envisioned this kind of pink, pink, pink, happy,
[2:15]bright light of a book, joyful and about that in the 1960s
[2:21]kind of madmen for women or madmen,
[2:23]but about the women.
[2:25]And I finally just wrote it.
[2:26]I didn't, the world is so dark right now.
[2:28]I didn't have any darkness in me to put on the page.
[2:31]And so I thought I remembered a conversation
[2:34]that Helen Garley Brown and I had once
[2:35]and I got up during the night
[2:37]and I used that as a jumping off point
[2:39]to kind of imagine some things.
[2:41]And then I kept going and wrote it in a year and eight months,
[2:44]which is actually quite quick for me.
[2:45]So one of the things, I feel like there is one little dark
[2:48]through line of this book,
[2:50]which is that, which actually, I think,
[2:53]really propels the narrative a lot is finding out
[2:56]what exactly happened with Helen Garley Brown
[2:59]and the accident with her father
[3:01]and what happened with her sister
[3:03]and then her sister's life story.
[3:06]And so you have Helen's trajectory of her immediate family
[3:11]and all of the kind of bad stuff that happens,
[3:15]coursing throughout to the point where I'm like,
[3:17]well, what happened and how did that happen?
[3:19]So yes, we have this beautiful, glamorous,
[3:22]professional success, but deep inside,
[3:25]there is this memory and stewing over the situation
[3:30]that was out of Helen's control.
[3:32]Yeah, you know, when I started at Cosmo,
[3:35]like I said, I got out of graduate school at NYU
[3:37]was waiting tables.
[3:38]I was dreaming of writing a novel
[3:40]and having a career as a novelist
[3:41]and I got this horrific rejection letter.
[3:44]It was, so our editor had returned a manuscript
[3:47]that I sent to her directly.
[3:48]She said I could, I didn't need an agent.
[3:50]And she sent a nice rejection back, a polite one.
[3:53]And when I pulled the manuscript out of the box,
[3:55]this little scrap of paper flowed into the floor
[3:57]and it was a note from an in-house reader
[4:00]mistakenly left in the manuscript.
[4:02]And it said, I could barely make it to page 60
[4:04]and I feel really badly for anyone
[4:06]who has to read the whole thing.
[4:07]Oh no, I know, I was like very down now,
[4:11]but it took to my bed, it was like, you know.
[4:14]Oh my gosh.
[4:15]But I round that time, I thought, you know,
[4:16]it's too painful, I can't write anymore.
[4:18]Around that time, I went on a job interview.
[4:21]I heard about a position in the book's department
[4:24]at Cosmo opening packages two days a week.
[4:26]And I went on the job interview and I got the job.
[4:30]And the first day I met Helen
[4:32]and it was happened to be the day
[4:34]of the OJ Simpson verdict which we watched in her office.
[4:37]And, you know, I never thought she and I had anything
[4:40]in common at all.
[4:41]I thought I might stay at the magazine two weeks
[4:43]as I said, I stayed for 23 years.
[4:45]But do you know, Helen and I did have some things in common
[4:47]which were less than glamorous childhoods, you know.
[4:51]She came from very humble beginnings.
[4:53]You know, for me, I've told you
[4:54]before my dad was truck driver
[4:56]and I used to go trucking in the summers with him.
[4:58]She had this, you know, her father passed in this horrible way
[5:02]when she was just a girl 10 years old,
[5:04]a really freak accident.
[5:06]And her mother always kind of drove into her,
[5:09]this refrain of you're not pretty enough.
[5:11]You and your sister are not pretty enough.
[5:13]And it haunted Helen in the way some things
[5:15]were my childhood, although I had a very loving family.
[5:18]It was, you know, a kooky upbringing haunt me.
[5:21]And so we turned out to,
[5:23]we did have some things in common
[5:24]and we became friends with each other
[5:26]and I would go see her in her office
[5:28]and she would send me notes all the time
[5:29]when many notes from her still.
[5:31]And so I used that in the book
[5:33]because I knew underneath the sort of glamour of her life
[5:37]there was that core person shaped by her youth
[5:42]and by the trauma of her youth.
[5:45]And I could relate to that.
[5:46]Wow. Well, that was one of my favorite through lines.
[5:51]Honestly, I mean, I loved the whole thing
[5:52]and it was just so amazing.
[5:55]Also to see the other cast of characters.
[5:58]I mean, this is really an ensemble piece.
[5:59]It's not just about Helen.
[6:01]It's about everyone who was like part of this founding team
[6:04]and how Cosmo got started and the Britbury
[6:08]and you know, that's kind of it took for her to even do this
[6:11]and the limited opportunity and how she just made it happen.
[6:14]And then how all the characters
[6:17]that have developed over time and interact
[6:19]and you're this one, speaking of free accidents,
[6:23]like falling out of a champagne flute.
[6:26]Thank you.
[6:26]A champagne glass hot tub.
[6:28]A champagne glass hot tub, yes.
[6:30]It was in my head.
[6:31]I just couldn't get the words out.
[6:33]I had the visual for whatever her co-workers.
[6:39]Talk about the idea of making this yes about her
[6:42]but also about all of the other co-founders
[6:46]of the magazine, really.
[6:47]You know what it is so much of Helen's life
[6:51]was the kind of the threat of it
[6:55]was so much of her relationships with other women
[6:58]in the workplace, her being a boss
[7:00]for the first time when she took over Cosmo
[7:02]and when she took over Liz Smith,
[7:04]who I also was very fortunate to know
[7:06]the famed gossip columnist when Helen took over Liz
[7:09]was still the entertainment editor at Cosmo.
[7:11]She had not begun her career as a gossip columnist
[7:14]and the two formed an instant life long friendship.
[7:18]And I just thought in writing about Helen,
[7:21]the best way to write about her
[7:22]and to really show what a dynamic, unique, quirky woman
[7:28]she was to show her relationships with other women.
[7:31]And so Liz came naturally because I knew Liz
[7:34]and then the other women were less well known,
[7:38]they led more private lives.
[7:39]So the most I had to go on was the stories they edited
[7:43]in those issues at the time
[7:44]because when I was an editor so often
[7:46]the cover lines of stories were informed by our staff
[7:49]and what everyone pitched and what was going on
[7:51]with their boyfriend, their fiance, their mother,
[7:54]their father, their friends and those became,
[7:56]that was all fodder for the articles
[7:58]that were probably was the same in the 1960s.
[8:01]So I got my hands on all these old issues
[8:04]in the 60s, many of which I have,
[8:05]I should go grab on the show, they're so, so fun
[8:09]and so brilliant and so colorful and outrageous.
[8:12]And so I used those stories to kind of,
[8:14]or those cover lines and articles to kind of reverse engineer
[8:18]narratives to imagine what was going on
[8:20]in the lives of the editors at the time.
[8:23]So I don't know, I just didn't wanna write like a bio,
[8:27]like a fictionalized biography of Helen.
[8:29]I wanted it to be about women's magazines in the 1960s
[8:32]about Cosmo, about Liz Smith, about Helen,
[8:35]about the other women in the office.
[8:37]And so, and that's what I did.
[8:39]And it was really fun and then the champagne glass hot tub
[8:42]seemed, you know, for those who are watching it,
[8:46]I've read it and the real champagne glass hot tub
[8:49]was not introduced until I think the early 80s.
[8:52]But I just grew up, I don't know if you remember
[8:55]this commercial film.
[8:55]Beautiful material art, yeah.
[8:57]Exactly, yeah.
[8:58]Everyone I just fell down, Terry, log.
[9:00]You have to bring, oh, you remember that project.
[9:04]Exactly.
[9:05]So Amy Ryan, the actress who's incredible,
[9:09]she was in a film of another book of mine.
[9:13]And she and I've stayed friends and she recorded
[9:15]the audiobook, Single Girls, which is so exciting.
[9:18]And she, just like you, was able to sing this song.
[9:21]So many people in my life, one of my agents
[9:24]was able to sing this song.
[9:25]Everybody who grew up on the East Coast remembers that song.
[9:28]And so I just was like, I need to put that in.
[9:31]And that good thing about writing fiction
[9:34]is you can kind of fudge things.
[9:35]So I made it an early prototype of what later
[9:39]became the champagne glass hot tub we all know.
[9:42]And it was just such a fun color.
[9:43]We'll see this unofficial sex and relationship editor
[9:47]goes with her boyfriend for the romantic weekend
[9:50]and this rickety kind of first edition champagne glass hot tub
[9:54]and have a sexual misadventure, as we'd say in class.
[9:58]Mm hm.
[10:00]I'm so happy you have fun reading it, Zippy. Thank you.
[10:03]So, so much fun. Oh my gosh. And then there's also the disappointment. Like one of her other
[10:09]editors who had a first marriage to a man who on their wedding night, you know, was clear that he
[10:16]was more interested in wearing lingerie than taking hers off. And what do you do with a situation
[10:21]like that? And, you know, how we get into situations where maybe they just weren't in the plan.
[10:28]And how do you rebound for that? Yeah. Well, so much of what I, you know, I was in the 1960s,
[10:35]I was not editing a magazine. I was not around. So, I, but I, so much of what I know about the
[10:40]decade and what I know from talking to women, which I, you know, I worked in an office with women
[10:44]for many years. And is that the, in the 1960s in particular, the world didn't really support women
[10:50]in many obvious ways that we know in so many terms of rights and things. But also just in terms of society
[10:57]and women, you know, Helen's big belief that women were what she said, herded, hypnotized
[11:04]into marriage, you know, for the first person that their parents thought they should marry and that
[11:08]was Helen's whole thing. Like, you don't have to rush into marriage. You can be single. You can
[11:13]enjoy your sex life. You can enjoy dating different men. You don't have to feel ashamed of it.
[11:19]And so I wanted to capture that experience. And I found in one of the old issues, a story that
[11:25]when husbands fail as lovers, a young wife's Frank report. And I thought, oh, well, I wonder
[11:32]who pitched this idea, which editor what was going on her life at the time. And that's how the
[11:37]story that you're talking about was born from that. Wow. So interesting. And back to Liz Smith,
[11:42]by the way, who I didn't know was a brunette really. Is that true? Yes. Yeah. She was. Yeah. She was.
[11:49]Fun facts. Fun facts. Yeah. I mean, Liz Smith also, you know, in one of the openings, I feel
[11:55]I'm not giving too much away, but like, you know, comes out early to Helen and feels very supported and
[12:03]it seals their friendship forever and her own point of view of things. Talk about that.
[12:09]Well, I also, you know, when I thought about Liz, she was she was private about that part of her
[12:14]life. She didn't go around telling people that, but I also know, like, she and Helen used to
[12:18]rent a house and psych harbor in the summers or Liz would rent a house in Helen would go.
[12:23]And they had this relationship where they would kind of drive each other crazy, like Liz said,
[12:27]it was like this box car of a house they rented and Liz would be soon be downstairs and Helen would
[12:31]be up at sunrise doing her calisthenics, making noise and Liz would be like, with that text,
[12:37]I'm not a good mimic in that sense. I'm like, what the hell are you doing there? And so they kind
[12:42]of had and Liz hated the Scavolo covers and she was like, they're so tacky and Helen would say,
[12:49]well, as soon as they stop selling Liz, I'll book the photographer you like, you know, so they had
[12:54]this kind of funny, bickering relationship. But I thought at some point they must have had a conversation
[13:01]about Liz's sexuality, you know, because Liz was not, she wasn't, she didn't deny her sexuality at
[13:08]all, but she, she didn't advertise it. And I thought, well, what would that be like? And so
[13:13]that was how that scene was born. It's that, it's that in the deli and Carnegie deli, I think,
[13:17]you know, and it was just so fun to write in, there was a real sweetness between them.
[13:21]And you know, I have to say the book is dedicated to certain women who really helped me start
[13:27]my career as a writer and change my life, the memory of Helen Gruelly Brown and also the memory
[13:31]of Liz Smith. And once Liz Smith early on wrote about me and her column, she called me one of her
[13:36]little pets. And my grandmother, my grandmother, who was not a milk and cookies grandmother, she was a
[13:42]tough talk and chain smoking lady. She called me and she said, Johnny, I called Liz's office to thank her.
[13:48]And I said, oh, my God, you called her office. What did you say? I was like, Zippy, I was like,
[13:54]what did you say? And she said, Liz said to her, she said, my grandmother said, I just want to thank
[13:58]you for writing about my Johnny. And Liz said, you know, the whole reason I do this job is to make
[14:02]grandmothers proud. So I'm happy to hear it. And I thought it was the sweetest thing. It was so
[14:07]sweet. She had such a big heart. And I felt, you know, I found while writing this book, I found
[14:14]so many letters from Helen notes from Liz. And I, I was just a kid. And I, I realized looking back
[14:20]how lucky I was to have these powerful women just show me love and believe in me as a writer and
[14:27]give support because I didn't really grow up with anybody telling me, oh, you can be a writer
[14:31]one day and moved to New York and have this big life. It was not in the cards for me, you know.
[14:36]So then how did that happen? You know, when I was, I guess 20, but my, my younger sister,
[14:42]I think maybe I've told this for but she passed away after her senior prom really tragically.
[14:47]And at that point, I just so cliche to say as a writer and not supposed to use cliches as
[14:52]writer, but I really realized life is short. And I thought, you know what, I have always
[14:57]wanted to be a writer and I had this dream and I'm just going to do it. And I moved to the city,
[15:03]my father was shipping Broadway show sets at the time. He was bringing in the set of
[15:07]the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, which had a big bird cage in his truck in the back.
[15:11]And I moved here and I got a partial scholarship from my writing to NYU and I waited tables
[15:17]for many years and kept writing and getting a lot of rejection. And eventually I wrote a book
[15:24]that sold and I heard about the job at Cosmo. I think that came first, heard about that part-time
[15:30]position at Cosmo. And I wrote a book that sold and then I just kept writing, you know. But this
[15:34]book is particularly, all my books haven't are meaningful to me obviously. But this book, it was so
[15:40]much fun to bring out a different side of my personality to be able to really be playful with
[15:45]it. And as you said, it's an awful so there's paid those and serious things happen. But to have,
[15:49]you know, there's Helen had gone to this unorthodox therapy. And so I wrote this
[15:54]nude group therapy scene in LA in the late 50s that was so much fun to write. And so it was just
[16:00]great because when you're writing more of a suspense novel, you kind of don't get, you can have
[16:05]fun in different ways. Like, I would hand my books into my editor before and I would say, isn't
[16:09]a hilarious. And she's like, no, you have like people murdered and people being hit and have
[16:15]it this job. Well, that's not hilarious. But this book, everybody's like, it's so much fun. So it,
[16:20]and there's something about this book, but I don't know if it's the pink cover. I don't know if
[16:23]it's causing my Helen like when I tell people about it, they just get excited and want to
[16:28]want to read it. And it's a really nice satisfying feeling as a writer because you know, you work,
[16:33]you've read two so you know, Zippy, we work so hard and long on our craft. And so it's nice
[16:39]when you feel people connecting with what you've done, you know, but it's not just fun. It's also
[16:44]really good and well paced and it has all the elements, you know, it's, it's totally immersive. Like,
[16:50]you don't want to put it down. It's very, it's more than just fun. It's, you know, and it's,
[16:55]the fact that it's a cultural sort of artifact as well in a way just enhances it. But at its core,
[17:02]it's about friendships and entrepreneurship and creation and all these like, and doing it in a whole
[17:09]new way where it's about the relationships that prior to that people were not really talking about.
[17:16]So it's quite original. And so I feel like all of that startup energy in a way is like in the
[17:23]book as it like as we watch it all build and and all of it. So it's really awesome.
[17:28]Yeah. Oh, thank you Zippy. It means so much to me. And I like hearing you say that because it is
[17:34]so much, you know, working in a magazine for years, you really become such close friends with
[17:38]the people you work with and they become kind of a second family. And I wanted to capture that
[17:43]feeling with, with these, the single girls and how they all bond and connect and what they all
[17:50]mean to each other. And there's a scene in the end where they're all together. And one of them says,
[17:56]like, you know, people look back on old books and old movies, but people don't usually look back on
[18:01]old magazines. And they're like, what happens? And like they're forgotten. And you,
[18:06]it's something I used to think about because when we would be editing and we'd be caught up in it,
[18:10]and then we'd ship it to the printer. And then a few months later, it'd pick up the issue and it
[18:15]already looked old just a few months later. It was so fascinating to me. And so, you know,
[18:21]magazines are kind of forgotten. And sometimes the editors who work so hard and give their lives to
[18:26]them are forgotten. And so that's why this book is my tribute, not just to Helen, but to
[18:31]the women who worked on Cosmo, but also the women in the magazine industry and the magazine
[18:36]industry is not the same as that had been, even when I was in it. So I wanted to capture all of
[18:41]that feeling. So I'm glad you think I did. So thank you. You definitely did. And just the last
[18:47]perfect piece, I think is Helen's marriage and her relationship. Actually, where they married,
[18:51]her, yeah, they were married, right? Yeah. Yes, they were. Yeah. Because that dynamic was such
[18:58]a great spin on her life. Like we know her professionally, but just the way that she interacted,
[19:05]oh my gosh, it was just amazing. Anyway, I love that. I'm glad you had moment David too. Also,
[19:11]it was nice to see a relationship where he was so supportive of her, but an marriage where
[19:16]a man is so supportive of a woman's career. I just love seeing that, you know, so it was great.
[19:21]First to be Irish girl boss. Yeah, she was. I always love seeing you. And I have to say,
[19:28]thank you for all you do for books and authors. It's really, really incredible what you do.
[19:32]And I speak for, I know thousands of authors who say thank you. So I appreciate it. And I know
[19:38]so many others do too. So thank you. Thanks, John. So sweet. All right. Okay. All right. I'll see you soon.
[19:43]Mm-hmm. Okay. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi,
[19:49]formerly momstone have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend,
[19:54]leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much.
[20:00]Go and buy the books.