Laura: At one point, this would’ve been late in 2018, I was up late at night. My husband was away on business. I'd had a couple of glasses of wine. I saw that there was a section on the Longreads site, which both curates and commissions long pieces, about aging. I thought, I have a story about aging that I've never read. It's about being the oldest mom always. I was fifty-one when my daughter was born. I have no contenders. I remember there was a mom in my neighborhood who said, "I used to be the oldest mom before you showed up." She's ten years younger than I am. I pitched this to Sari Botton at Longreads. It took me four months to write it. Then when I did, it kind of changed everything. It got a huge response. Sari asked me to write more pieces. The next piece I wrote was about body positivity. At that point, my longtime editor, I worked with the same editor for my novels for my entire career, we went to lunch with my agent. She said, "Do you think you have a book of essays in you?" I said that thing that you should never say. How hard could it be? [laughter] I'll never say that again, but I did. I think there were seven essays that had been published before in the book, one of which had been written and never been published. That was the title essay, "My Life as a Villainess." Then I generated seven new essays over last summer and last fall. That became this book.